


Devotion

by vaarchie



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Drama & Romance, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones, POV Veronica Lodge, Protective Archie Andrews, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-03-10 21:23:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 45,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13510047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaarchie/pseuds/vaarchie
Summary: Veronica lets Archie hold her, their pulses tapping out a syncopated rhythm, her breathing finally evening out. Her eyes have been closed for a few minutes when he says, “I love you,” so quiet, like a prayer whispered into her neck.She's nearly asleep, edges blurring. “I love you too,” she murmurs because it's true. She loves his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he keeps hidden safe beneath his skin, and she loves how she is still, every day, learning him. She loves his silly, secret goofy side and the way he has of making her feel like a sunset, just from the way he looks at her face. She loves Archie Andrews so much that sometimes she can't sit still for the fullness of it.-or- Clearly the Lodges’ extracurriculars skew toward the illegal, but this is the first time Veronica is caught in the backdraft – the first time her life is truly in danger.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read any sneak peeks I've posted on my Tumblr (vaarchie, btw, if you're feeling chatty) then some of this will be familiar to you, but most of it is new. Because I am a horrible mean person, there's going to be a lot of angst in this fic, but I'll ask you to trust me and hope that you enjoy it.

Veronica is confident her parents are in bed when she slips through the front door and finds them standing in front of the windows, gazing out at the downpour like they're expecting the mysteries of the universe to be revealed to them from outside.

Come to think of it, maybe they are.

She stops. She stares. She could try to tiptoe past them or try for plausible deniability, could claim she lost track of time, but already she knows she's going to be walking out of this room with some kind of punishment for coming home so late. Water from the storm outside drips from her hair and onto the pristine rug; a tiny puddle forms around her feet.

“Hey, Ronnie.” Just like that, just like always, she's caught. He’s straightening his tie, careful, but no one has ever sneaked up on Hiram Lodge in his entire life, and when he turns to face his daughter, he doesn't look a bit surprised, or even angry.

“Hey, Daddy,” she says slowly, a sound like waves and roaring in her head. Something is wrong. She slips her index finger through her key ring and squeezes, the cold metal biting into the flesh of her palm, but before she has time to feel properly unsettled, her parents are bypassing the _‘Where have you been?' _s and hugging her tight. Like it's something they do a lot.__

__She blinks. “I didn't realize,” she begins, not entirely sure of which particular ignorance she's about to confess: all of them, maybe, sixteen years’ worth of universal truths everyone was smart enough to figure out except for her._ _

____

__

"We need to tell you something, Veronica,” her mother says, stepping back but keeping one manicured hand set lightly on her daughter's shoulder. She clears her throat, clearly apprehensive, and it makes Veronica's own nerves skyrocket. “Come with us.” 

They lead her to the kitchen; on the table is a small wooden box, and on the counter is a half chopped carrot and a gritty-skinned tomato, abandoned and slightly wrinkled. 

“What's going on?” Veronica asks, trying to keep her voice steady. The anticipation of bad news is starting to slowly kill her now. “Just rip the band-aid off and tell me.” 

Her father sighs like the end of the world is at hand, and pulls several envelopes out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “Your mother and I have been receiving threatening letters for a few weeks now.” 

Veronica swallows as a few pieces click into place. They've been fighting, her parents -- raging at each other like they're in the throes of a truly spectacular screaming match, and on top of that, they've all but turned the Pembrooke into a military encampment that Veronica is seldom allowed to leave, especially not without a set curfew, and, more often than not, an escort, whether that be Andre or Archie or one of her parents themselves. “And you didn't tell me?” 

“No,” he says, and looks at her evenly. Outside, thunder claps and wind rushes by like God is sending a flood for forty days. 

“Why not?” She asks, staring right back at him. His hair is going gray at the temples. 

“We didn't tell you,” her father says, and he is the very theology of calm, “because we were hoping they weren't serious.” 

Well. 

Both of them are staring at Veronica, waiting. “Did something else happen?” She asks warily. 

Her mother picks up the wooden box on the table and holds it carefully, like it's a grenade that's going to explode at any given moment. Slowly, she slides the cover off, and when Veronica peers inside, she feels a chill run down her spine. 

There's a picture of her with her face scribbled out in permanent marker. There's a knife -- a _machete _, Veronica notes with a wave of nausea -- covered in what appears to be dry blood and wrapped in a string of pearls. Jesus Christ, there's even voodoo dolls of the three of them, nooses wrapped tight around their fabricated necks. There's a typed letter that Veronica doesn't want to read.__

___“What the hell does this mean?” She takes a deep breath and tries to contain the overflow. “Someone's putting a hit on us?”_ _ _

___Her father takes the box, shuts it tight. “For now, it just means that we're going to have to take extra precautions and up our security. Okay?”_ _ _

___Veronica shuts her eyes as lightning cracks overhead. She barely sleeps that night, finally falling into a fitful sort of rest an hour before her alarm is blaring in her ear and telling her to get ready for school._ _ _

___She half expects someone to shoot her in the head the second she steps out of the Pembrooke, some sniper on a rooftop or a hitman in the bushes, and she laughs out loud, hysteria more than anything else. Andre drives her to school and she feels a host of emotions as she sits through each banal class, fear and anger and avoidance. At lunch, she eats at a table with Archie and Jughead and Betty -- just one more thing they've always done together, world without end. She almost laughs again at the cruel irony of it all. Clifford Blossom had threatened to kill Jughead. The Black Hood had psychologically tormented Betty and then attempted to have Archie buried alive, so now, it seems, it's Veronica's turn to face off against some sick minded lunatic._ _ _

___“V?” Betty looks at her, her delicate chin angled with curiosity and an open, comforting expression on her face. “You okay?”_ _ _

___“Yeah, I'm fine,” Veronica says, and even as she tries to tamp it down she can feel the edge creeping into her voice. Archie looks at her curiously. “I just--” she pushes her food around with her fork, fidgeting. All of a sudden she feels alarmingly close to tears. “I'm fine.”_ _ _

___“Ronnie,” Archie says, setting his hand over hers, and now he really does look concerned, all his boyfriend instincts coming online at once. “What's wrong?”_ _ _

___For a second she almost tells them everything: her mom and dad and how lonely she feels lately, how she needs to get out of Riverdale, how someone out there wants her and her family dead. The way they're looking at her, their faces open and caring, makes her think they'll listen and be able to help. Still, spilling her guts right here at the lunch table? That's pathetic. That's absurd._ _ _

___“Nothing,” she tells him, smiling as hard and as brightly as she can manage. She probably looks deranged. “I'm great.”_ _ _

___She gets an A on the Biology quiz next period. In English, she starts working her way through Sylvia Plath’s _Collected Poems, _but that makes Betty really nervous, so she switches to Jane Austen so she can sleep without worrying Veronica is going to put her head in an oven or something.___ _ _

_____Which she isn't._ _ _ _ _

_____Probably._ _ _ _ _

_____She feels so incredibly, unforgivably _afraid _, is the worst part, like no where she goes will ever be safe again. She's never been scared of much of anything before, and then a wooden box appears on her kitchen table and she’s done, game over, thanks for playing. It's wrong. It's _terrifying _._____ _ _ _ _

_________It hurts like nothing else in her life._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_________The final bell rings and she squints at the sun, wondering where on Earth she might go without feeling like prey about to be pounced on. Very clearly, she thinks of Archie, and right on cue, like one shining moment in the horror movie of her recent life, he appears at her side and wraps an arm around her waist._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_________“I have to go to football practice,” he says, “and I know you have cheer. But can I take you on a drive afterwards?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_________Veronica feels her pulse like a ticking bomb in her throat, but the way he looks at her makes her stop shaking, at least. “Yeah,” she murmurs, and he kisses her._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

* * *

_________Archie holds the door open and Veronica follows him across the school's parking lot to his dad's old truck. He doesn't talk, and she has no idea where they're going, but at this point it feels a little late to ask; she opens her mouth, hesitates, shuts it again. Archie doesn't seem bothered at all. The middle of winter means the sun went out an hour ago._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

________She glances around the truck as surreptitiously as she can manage, beginning a list in her head as he hits the gas. _Floor of the Andrews’ truck, a complete inventory: empty Snapple bottle -- peach iced tea -- check. Duke Ellington Live at Newport 1956, check. Dashboard: sunglasses, check. Tree shaped air freshener still in the package, check. Mix CD with Betty Cooper's handwriting on the label, check _._ _ _ _ _ _____

___________She closes her eyes for a second. Her best friend in New York used to make her mixes all the time, songs for her birthday and Christmas and springtime and Tuesdays. Her favorite was called “The Bad Behavior Mix,” sixty minutes of ridiculous club music presented to her on the occasion of their first high school dance. They'd ended up back at Veronica's house by 9:30 that night, abandoning after party plans in favor of making brownies with Hermione and shouting along to the music doubled over in hysterical giggles._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________She doesn't mean to sigh, never even hears herself do it, but she must, because Archie glances over at her as he turns a corner, sharp features lit reddish by the neon lights on the dash. “Long day?” he asks._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Yeah,” she replies, letting him think it’s the monotony of school getting her down and not the absolute hopelessness of her life at present. “Kind of.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________His eyes glitter a hundred thousand adjectives beyond bright as he nods. “Want milkshakes?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________She blinks. “Milkshakes?” she repeats. She doesn't know what she was expecting, but it wasn't… that. Though it probably should have been._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Yeah, princess, milkshakes,” he laughs as he pulls into Pop's, not bothering to wait for her answer. “Were you hoping I'd just drive us out of the state or something?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“No!” she says, although to be honest, Archie is probably closer to the truth than not. She unbuckles her seatbelt and climbs out of the car. “No.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“There's something else bothering you,” he bumps her shoulder with his as they cross the parking lot, so lightly she thinks it was probably an accident. “Other than school stuff.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________She shakes her head and looks away. “There really isn't.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Okay,” he says, his voice like he thinks she's full of shit but doesn't particularly mind. “I'll wait until you're ready to tell me.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________They order at the counter and she digs in her purse for her wallet, pulling out a set of house keys and her map of NYC to get to the bottom. Archie pushes her hand away. “I got it,” he tells her and hands a wrinkled twenty to Pop, looking at Veronica like she's a little out of her mind because he always pays when they're together. He nods at the map. “Planning a trip back home?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Yes,” she says. “I mean, no.” It suddenly feels enormously stupid, this game she plays with herself, like hopscotch or Barbie. “Just a reminder of my old life.” She balls up the map in her fists and tosses it into the trash can._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________Archie raises his eyebrows as he guides her over to a table. After living in Riverdale for nearly six months, the old-fashioned chock’lit shop is as familiar to Veronica as breathing, with its wood paneling and glowing lights, the antique cash register that springs open with a loud ring. She smells sugar and cold air._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Ronnie?” He says cautiously. “If you won't tell me what's wrong, just please -- promise me you're not in danger or anything.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________Pop chooses that very moment to slide their milkshakes onto their table and then depart with a few pleasantries, and Veronica busies herself with wrapping her red lips around the straw, her mouth full of ice cream instead of conversation. Archie is still staring at her when she looks up though, waiting her out, and she suddenly feels too big for these walls. “Pop?” She calls. “We're going to take these to go.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________Two minutes later, she herds Archie back toward the door, and he holds it open with one foot as she slips through. They don't speak as they cross the lot toward the truck, navigating a teeming crowd of noisy, restless kids about their age, shouts and laughter. Once there, Archie climbs up onto the hood with his milkshake and tilts his head to the empty space beside him until Veronica gets the message and pulls her heeled boots up onto the bumper along with him._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“My dad,” she says, “has a lot of enemies.” Archie keeps staring at her. “And as nice as it would be if this weren't the case, I sometimes get caught in the backdraft.” The words sound wooden and unfamiliar; this isn't something she tells anyone, really. “People he's made angry… they've been sending our family… messages… recently.” She feels vaguely sick, remembering the bloody knife wrapped in pearls, remembering the dolls, remembering the way it's driving her parents apart, the catalyst for their fights. “Baseless threats, mostly,” she says, trying to convince herself as much as Archie, “but it's making my parents fight. That's it.” She finally looks back at him. “I'm not in any danger,” she says, trying to sound sincere, and she thinks she must do a pretty good job of it, because when she leans toward him, Archie slides his free hand into her hair and kisses her, and she tastes chocolate and rainbow sprinkles and closes her eyes._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________He pulls back a little bit. “Is this okay?” he asks after a second or two._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________She nods._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Not making things worse, am I?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________She shakes her head. “No,” she says, recovering slightly. When Archie kisses her, her fears skitter like moths at the panicky edges of her brain, and she feels… calm. “Better, actually.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________Archie tosses his milkshake into a nearby trash can and cups both of his hands around her face. “Good.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________He's still kissing her when her phone rings inside her pocket a minute later, and he makes to pull away but her grip tightens, a gentle fist in his hair. “Ignore it. Ignore it,” she mutters, and he does for a minute, but then it rings again._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

___________“Archie,” she says breathlessly, reaching for her phone even as the rest of her is still otherwise engaged. “Archie, it's my house. I have to pick it up. Hello?” she says, while -- oh God, oh _hell _, they’re in the middle of a parking lot and her _dad _is on the phone -- Archie moves his mouth down to her neck. “Hi. What's up?”_____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________“Veronica,” her father says, and there’s a sound in his voice she's never heard before, panic and anger. “Oh, thank God. Where in the hell are you?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________She jumps off the hood of the truck so fast that she just about takes Archie's head off, squeezing her eyes shut as she tries to figure out what to say._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________She's still trying to come up with an answer when he pushes forward; “Are you with Betty?” he demands._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________She curls her free hand into a fist. Archie watches her carefully. She fumbles around for something plausible, finally has to settle for the truth. “No,” she admits. “No, I'm not.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________“Thank God,” he says again, then, to whomever is in the room with him, Hermione, probably: “She's okay. I've got her.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________“What?” Veronica says sharply. Suddenly she's very, very afraid. “What's going on?”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_______________“Ronnie,” he says, and she knows she'll never forget this as long as she lives, the neon lights of Pop's glowing over her, the curious expression on Archie Andrews’ pretty face, and the tiny shards of glass embedded in the asphalt, like something fragile and bright had only just exploded there. “I have to tell you something bad.”_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _


	2. Chapter 2

If Archie had any idea of what the next twenty four hours would look like, he might tell himself:  _ Hey! You're having a Pivotal Moment in a Sentimental Place. _ Sitting on the hood of the truck with Veronica -- on a scale of 1 to Serious, he should have rated that moment at least a 9. But he didn't. His Serious Scale didn't even register. Not a single cell in his brain cared to define the evening in the grand scheme of things. Or in any scheme of things, really.

 

Now, though, Archie doesn't say a word as he speeds away from Pop's and toward the hospital, quiet as nighttime. It feels like a chasm has opened in Veronica's chest. The CD in the stereo is still spinning, some old Louis Armstrong, and she reaches forward to click it off. “It's bad, right?” She whispers. “My father said Betty and Jughead might both already need emergency surgery, and he wouldn't--” She breaks off, the words swallowed up by guilt and confusion and this huge, endless fear. She digs her fingernails into the passenger seat, willing the truck to go faster. “It must be bad.”

 

They park in the cavernous garage at the hospital and get lost on the way to the ER, the two of them wandering the corridors, panicky and on edge. “This way,” Archie says finally, and Veronica follows him down a freezing, fluorescent hallway, then through a set of doors and into chaos.

 

There's a crowd in the waiting room, small but restless. Jughead's dad and Betty's, Alice crying noisily with her hair secured in a haphazard knot. And there are Archie and Veronica's parents, watchful and waiting, somehow already gutted like carcasses or husks. Hermione looks heartbroken. Fred and Hiram look old.

 

They get to their feet as Archie and Veronica run across the wide expanse of linoleum, throwing off fear and heat. Veronica doesn't have time to get to her mom and dad though, because Mrs. Cooper spots her and rushes forward, grabbing her so tightly it's painful. She feels her ribs scrape together inside her chest. “The motorcycle got ran off the road. Betty is in surgery,” Alice wails. It's a sound Veronica has never heard before, and, if it pleases God, a sound she would like never to hear again.

 

She thinks, very clearly:  _ This isn't happening. _

 

She thinks, very clearly:  _ Who ran them off the road? _

 

She stands there with Betty's mom for a while, lets her sob into the limp fabric of her shirt. She doesn't cry. She doesn't do much of anything, to be honest; she feels frozen, bizarrely quiet, like something has been hermetically sealed inside her. She hears the whine of an ambulance in the distance, the whoosh of a door whispering shut. Finally Mr. Cooper pries Alice gently from her arms.

 

“They can't die,” Veronica tells him.

 

“Ronnie.” That was her mom, coming closer, but Veronica steps away, out of her reach.

 

“I'm serious,” she says, and her voice is louder this time. She's having difficulty understanding what's happening. “They can't-- we were--”

 

She trails off as her mother wraps her arms around her, stands there loose-limbed and bewildered while Hermione whispers Spanish prayers in her ear. “I'm not  _ kidding _ ,” Veronica tells her, voice cracking. She feels her lungs start to collapse. She looks up one more time before she stops remembering anything, just in time to see the sharp, jagged pleat of Archie's backbone as she watches him fall into his father's arms and break down.

 

* * *

 

Later, Veronica glances around. The wall is sponged shades of taupe and beige, the floor speckled gray like a low-budget Pollock painting. The soda machine rumbles and glows. A young man with a towel wrapped around his hand sits next to a woman in a dress playing on her cell phone; they're the only other ones here. Slow day for emergencies, maybe. She crosses her legs, uncrosses them. It's uncomfortably cold in here, like the North Pole or a convenience store at 2 am, and she shivers, and almost immediately, Archie wraps his jacket around her. If he can't help Betty and Jughead, he can at least protect Veronica from freezing temperatures. She swallows.

 

Her cousin told her once that the night their grandpa died, her father sat in the pitch dark of their apartment on Park Avenue and played piano until the dawn came up orange and dripping behind him. Scales, he'd told her. Scales and Mozart and Billy Joel and anything else he could think of, things that no one, not even her father himself, could remember once morning finally broke.

 

Veronica has no way to account for the historical accuracy of this particular legend. Lord knows her cousin loves a good story, and he's never lacked the imagination to craft one, but since the night she first heard it -- whispered through the rainforest heat of upstate New York years after it supposedly happened -- she's believed on blind faith. There's a picture of it in her head: her father, features glass sharp and back hunched with grief, fingers flying over black and white piano keys. A picture so vivid that, for a long time, Veronica was convinced that maybe she remembered, too.

 

Now when she thinks about it for any length of time, she realizes it's probably just a composite, some sloppy amalgam from all the other nights when she did wake up to find him at the glossy Steinway that sat in state near the window at their place on Park Avenue. There were dozens upon dozens of those nights when she was a little girl, nights when she'd climb out of bed, woken by whatever heinous nightmare she'd been having to creep barefoot and half awake down the hall to listen to her father play his music. With the right song, you understand, her father could atone for whatever sins had been committed against his baby daughter by the world at large. With the right song, Veronica always thought with sleepy confidence as she leaned her dark head against the wall and closed her eyes, that her father could set her free.

 

She hasn't heard him play music in years. She plays it for herself now, or, more often, Archie does, melodies he pulls out of thin air when he knows she's feeling down, when she's feeling happy, when she's feeling agitated. With his fingers curled around the neck of a guitar, he can admonish Veronica's every misgiving and help her see the way forward, can make her smile or sing or feel like she's flying.

 

“Ronnie.”

 

She looks up and realizes this isn't the first time Archie has called her name, and that he and her parents are all looking at her, waiting. Her ankle is bouncing wildly, and she stops it. “What?” She asks, defensive.

 

“Your dad asked you if you want coffee.”

 

“Yeah,” she says, not really caring one way or the other. Archie wraps his hand around hers, and they wait.

 

What they don't tell you about hospitals, what they don't show you on TV shows about well-scrubbed doctors and patients whose lives they save is how long everything takes. Hiram returns with two cardboard trays full of iced coffees. Veronica takes one and says thanks, Alice looks a little like she's died, FP paces, and Hermione mutters in Spanish:  _ “Dios te salve, Maria…” _

 

It's hours before anyone comes to talk to them, close to midnight by the time a scruffy, tired looking doctor in rimless glasses makes his way into the waiting room to let them know that, in fact, he has nothing to report. There have been some complications, he says vaguely; there's nothing he can tell them other than that. They'll be with Betty and Jughead until the morning, machines beeping and cold hands checking vital signs. They should all go home.

 

“I'll stay,” Hiram says immediately, shaking his head. “You should take off,” he tells Fred. “Mija, you should go, too.”

 

Veronica prickles. “If you're staying, I'm staying.”

 

Hermione looks at her, and as if someone has plugged in her power cord, she's back in action, taking charge. “Don't be stubborn, Ronnie,” she tells her. “Go get some sleep.”

 

“I'll take her home,” Archie volunteers.

 

“Don't talk about me like I'm not here,” Veronica snaps, short tempered now. “I'm right here.”

 

He shrugs, all innocence. “I know you are.”

 

“Go,” says Hermione. “I love you. Sleep.” Before she can react either way, her mother's got her arms around her, squeezing tight. “Ronnie,” she continues softly, and it occurs to Veronica that one day was never meant to hold so much. “Say a prayer.”

 

* * *

 

Back at the Pembrooke, Veronica slams the car door, the sound of it strangely startling. Archie walks her to her door, hesitates as she digs her keys out and gets it open.

 

“So,” he says, standing with his arms crossed. Veronica is half in her house and half out of it. “How are you?”

 

She shrugs, encumbered by the sudden and complete fatigue swallowing her whole body. “Okay. Tired.”

 

Archie's not satisfied. He doesn't move. “What else?”

 

“I don't know.” Something she can't name. “Out of my mind, maybe. Scared.” Everything is so heavy and she feels scared. That's it.

 

“I can stay with you,” he says at the same time she asks,

 

“Can you stay with me?”

 

She does not want to go inside this apartment by herself, but also, she doesn't want to be away from Archie. “I'm probably okay,” she says, but he interrupts.

 

“I'll stay in the living room until your parents get home.”

 

Veronica nods, and they go inside. She drops her bag to the floor with an unceremonious thud, and the first thing she does is check to make sure that every single window is locked.

 

“Hey,” Archie says, coming up behind her in the dining room. “Need help?”

 

She forces a small smile, half a second and gone. She walks across the room and turns on the AC, letting the filtered air in. “Couldn't breathe.” Maybe that's the truth, actually, now that she thinks about it. Maybe she hasn't had a decent amount of air in her lungs since yesterday. Could be she's brain-damaged and oxygen-deprived. She sinks down into a chair, exhausted.

 

“Go put your pajamas on,” Archie says, noticing how tired she is. She probably looks like garbage, though she can't exactly bring herself to care. “Are you hungry?”

 

She shakes her head. “I ate, like, three packs of M&Ms while we were waiting,” she tells him, accepting the hand he offers to help her to her feet.

 

“I know,” Archie says, leading her out of the dining room. “I watched you. It was impressive. You want real dinner, though?”

 

“Yes. Maybe. I don't know.”

 

“Well, since you feel so strongly about it,” he grins. “I'll run and see what's in the fridge. You go take your clothes off.”

 

She rolls her eyes a little and pads down the hall to her room and changes, hastily brushing out her hair. By the time she makes it to the kitchen, Archie has warmed leftovers from tonight's dinner and there's music floating in the air.

 

“Wanna get tanked?” He pokes his head out from behind the fridge door, holding a bottle of white wine.

 

Veronica snorts. “I thought you didn't drink wine.”

 

“I don't. But that doesn't mean you can't.”

 

“No thanks,” she says, hopping up onto the counter as he replaces it. He passes her her food and they sink into silence for a few minutes. Still, she's glad he's here. Her heartbeat has timed itself to the rhythm of the music, syrupy slow, and that realization is all it takes to send her into a fresh wave of panic. Someone ran Betty and Jughead off the road. What if it's the same person who's threatening her family? What if this is all her fault?

 

“Hey,” Archie says, “cut it out.”

 

She blinks. “Cut what out?”

 

“You didn't make them crash.”

 

“What?” For one crazy moment she thinks he's actually read her mind, but Archie just shrugs.

 

“That's what you were doing, right?” he asks, coming to stand in front of where she sits on the counter. “Blaming yourself for what happened?”

 

She considers denial, decides it's worthless. “Among other things.”

 

“Why?” He whispers. “What is it, Ronnie?”

 

Her breath stops coming easily. She looks at the wooden box that still sits on the kitchen table, thinks about the knife and the pearls and the pictures and the dolls. She almost tells him, but in the end she jumps off the counter, evading. This day has gone on for years, and she doesn't need anymore dangerous things.

 

“I think I'm going to try bed,” she tells him, putting a safe amount of distance between them, the clean expanse of kitchen tile. “Want me to set you up on the couch?”

 

Archie raises one dark eyebrow. “I think I can manage.”

 

“Okay, then.” They load their plates into the dishwasher. Veronica wipes down the counters. The moon washes in through the window, silver-pale.

 

* * *

 

Veronica isn't sleeping when the phone rings in the middle of the night -- just lying in bed and worrying about her friends, thoughts like a freight train hurtling stopless through her brain. She launches herself across the mattress to pick it up. “What?” she says immediately, voice panicky and shrill, demanding. “What? What? Tell me.”

 

“Veronica,” her mother says softly, and she thinks she's never been more afraid in all her days on God’s green earth. “Veronica. It's all right.”

 

_ It's all right _ .

 

Betty and Jughead are okay, she tells her calmly. They came through their surgeries critical but breathing, and now they're stable, and there's nothing to do but let them rest. “I love you,” Hermione says before she hangs up, Veronica's hand pale-knuckled and cold around the phone, chin on her knee in the dark. “And whatever else happens, sweetheart -- your dad loves you, too.”

 

She hangs up. She worries about what that last sentence from her mother means. She sits silent in the center of the mattress, like it's an island in the middle of the sea.

 

Finally she gets out of bed.

 

She opens her door and gasps: There's Archie sitting on the floor in the hallway, head back against the molding and elbows on his knees. He's taken off the shirt he was wearing -- it seems like days ago that they kissed in the parking lot of Pop's, all stupid and brave -- and now he's in his undershirt. “Hey,” he says, suddenly alert, “How are they?”

 

“Okay, I think. My mom says okay.” She squats so they're at eye level, voice quiet. “Whatcha doing?”

 

Archie shrugs a little. “Keeping watch.”

 

“For intruders?”

 

“For you,” he makes a face. “Sorry if I'm freaking you out. I'm just worried.”

 

“You're not freaking me out.”

 

“I'm freaking me out a little.”

 

Veronica shrugs. “Betty and Jug are okay. And so am I. For now, at least.”

 

Archie smiles. “Was that your mom on the phone?”

 

She nods. She's not surprised to find him out here, is the truth of it -- like somehow this is inevitable, the natural course of things. Maybe he's a homing pigeon. Maybe she's his home. “Do you ever think Riverdale is really not the right place for us?” he asks.

 

She breathes. “Every day,” she whispers. If only he knew. “But where am I going to go?”

 

“Not you,” he says, urgent, like there's something she's not understanding. “Us.”

 

“Us?”

 

“What if we got out of here?” he asks. “After graduation, I mean. Instead of college… what if we just went?”

 

Veronica swallows her heart back down into her chest. “Where?”

 

Archie looks right at her and smiles, huge and simple as a map of the world. “Everywhere,” he says.

 

_ Everywhere. _

 

“Archie.” Right away she thinks of all the places she's never been and all the things she hasn't done yet. She thinks of a road stretching all the way across the country and of all the nights she's spent alone, and when she sees he's still waiting for an answer, she takes a deep breath and braces herself. “I need to tell you something.”

 

A vertical line appears right between his eyebrows. Veronica stands, pulling him up with her. Her heart pounds like it's trying to break free and leave her as she guides him into the kitchen. They stand together at the table and she puts a hand over the wooden box. She focuses on his presence. He smells faintly like soap and the air is warmer near him, like his body is giving off more heat than usual.

 

“What's inside?” Archie asks.

 

“A message.” She keeps her hand over the box. There's a feeling in her chest like a moth against a windowpane, the desperate scrape of wings. “Well, sort of. More like a threat.”

 

Archie raises his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

 

Veronica sighs and waits. They're quiet as death as they listen to the AC sing its elegy as it hums high in the vents above their heads. She's a little bit afraid of how Archie might react -- go off like an improvised explosive, maybe, glass and shrapnel everywhere you look. She swallows the sudden thickness in her throat and slides the top off the box.

 

Archie is quiet for a moment, but Veronica feels him shift from curious and concerned to downright tempestuous. “What the hell is this?” He asks, voice low. The undertone of fear and alarm makes Veronica's heartbeat kick even faster. “What does the letter say?”

 

Veronica slams the top back over the box. “I don't know, and it doesn't matter,” she says. Also, really, she doesn't want to know what it says, doesn't want one more reason to feel this bone deep terror.

 

“Veronica--”

 

“My dad has more security in the lobby,” she says. “And I can't leave the house alone anymore.”

 

“Damn right,” Archie breathes out. His muscles have all gone rigid, his jaw locked tight. “Ronnie, I swear to God, I'm not letting anything happen to you. I can't-- if you--” he breaks off, rubbing a hand hard over his face.

 

“Hey,” she says, moving closer, pressing the length of her body flush against his, burying her face into his chest. “Hey. I'm okay, alright? I'm sorry.” He holds her tight.

 

“Sorry for what?”

 

Veronica pauses, then pulls back. “Archie,” she whispers. “What if the crash was my fault?”

 

“What?” Archie looks at her, bewildered and indignant. “You think it was a warning from whoever sent the box?”

 

She shrugs a little, tries to slow her breathing and not sound completely insane. “Maybe.”

 

Archie closes his eyes. “Maybe,” he agrees. “And maybe not. Either way, Ronnie, it's not  _ your _ fault.”

 

“I hope not,” she breathes out. She pushes the box away, tries to push her doubts away with it. “Can you come to bed with me?”

 

Archie nods, immediate.

 

“You okay?” he asks once she's locked them inside her bedroom, the two of them hidden from the sleeping world.

 

Veronica nods vaguely. “Mm-hm.”

 

“You sure?”

 

“I said yes, Archie.”

 

She's always a patchy, haunted sleeper, but tonight Veronica tosses more than usual, tangling the blankets, breathing hard. Archie runs his palm up and down her backbone, trying to quiet her, but it's like she's waiting for something to attack. Like she wants to get up and pace. She feels like a hydrogen bomb. She tries to be very still, but she knows he can feel her entire body tensing, a runner ready  to begin a race. Three times, she drifts off only to wake violently a moment later.

 

Veronica lets Archie hold her, their pulses tapping out a syncopated rhythm, her breathing finally evening out. Her eyes have been closed for a few minutes when he says, “I love you,” so quiet, like a prayer whispered into her neck.

 

She's nearly asleep, edges blurring. “I love you too,” she murmurs because it's true. She loves his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he keeps hidden safe beneath his skin, and she loves how she is still, every day, learning him. She loves his silly, secret goofy side and the way he has of making her feel like a sunset, just from the way he looks at her face. She loves Archie Andrews so much that sometimes she can't sit still for the fullness of it.

 

“Go to sleep now,” he whispers, and she does.


	3. Chapter 3

They drive too fast to the hospital the next day, a change of clothes and bagels for Veronica's parents on the seat between them. Hiram and Hermione and Alice and Hal and FP and Fred -- they all look like hell, but Betty and Jughead look alright, considering. Jug is groggy and sallow and Betty's got an IV taped to the back of her hand. They both have bruises and deep cuts on their visible skin. 

  


Veronica has fifty things to tell Betty but none of them say anything, and she sits on the edge of the bed while they watch the  _ Today Show, _ an incredibly boring segment about finding the best Spring produce. It makes her want strawberries. She fidgets. She thinks of how shocked Betty will be when she finds out Veronica might have been the cause of the crash, or if that's just the kind of bad luck she expects from being friends with her after all this time.

  


She watches as Betty scribbles on a notepad, ideas for her next Blue & Gold article. It makes her feel weirdly endeared, because Betty refuses to give up on the newspaper business -- which isn't dead yet, but is definitely on life support -- and for the past six months, she's refused to give up on Veronica, too.

  


She looks at Jughead then, who she's never been as close to -- she and him are like two shooting stars on totally different trajectories -- but her whole body stiffens at the thought of him lying dead on the side of the road.

  


“You two scared me,” she tells them finally. She wants to say  _ I'm sorry _ but doesn't know where to start. “Don't do it again.”

  


“We'll try our best,” Jughead says, nodding and leaning back against the pillows, the skin beneath his eyes pale and gray. “Mrs. Cooper already read us the riot act.”

  


“Did they find out who ran you off the road?” Archie asks. Veronica feels suspended in space.

  


Betty shakes her head and looks at Veronica. “No,” she says, “but V, your dad was in here a little while ago asking us all sorts of questions about what happened. He said he's going to hand it all off to the police.” She shrugs. “It felt a little weird, though.”

  


Veronica's heart lands somewhere around her shoes. “Oh my God,” she says, feeling a headache coming on. “I'm sorry.”

  


Betty dismisses that particular sentiment, says Veronica didn't do anything wrong so what is she apologizing for?

  


Veronica presses her lips together and tries as hard as she can to release the tension in her shoulders, to relax. Still, she's not exactly at ease and the hospital isn't offering a whole lot by way of distraction. By eight o'clock, her mother steps into the room and asks Veronica to come with her.

  


“What is it?” she hisses as Hermione leads her down the ghostly halls. She doesn't get a glance, much less a response. They round a corner and her mother pulls her through a door and into the chapel. Below the cross, a taciturn Virgin Mary holds court at the alter, a missing chunk of plaster where her veil should meet her dress. Hiram is standing there illuminated in the orange glow, an effigy or idol. For all the times she's seen him in church, it's never stopped feeling like something stilted or forced, as if someone like him could never belong in a place like this.

  


Veronica walks down the carpeted aisle and joins him. She runs her thumb over the statue, waiting. Hermione prays to Mary for virtually everything and swears that she answers every time, but if either this mother or Veronica's have any advice to dispense, at the moment they are holding their tongues.

  


“I saw them last night,” Hiram says solemnly, looking at the statue and not at Veronica. “The people who have been threatening us.”

  


It's so sudden she thinks she's misheard him. For a second she only stares at him, recalibrating, but then he continues.

  


“They were the ones who caused your friends to crash. As a warning of what they believe they're capable of doing to you.” It looks as if it's physically painful for him to say it, as if the words taste like gravel or bone. “They said they want us to hand over Lodge Industries and move out of Riverdale.”

  


Veronica thinks maybe she's turning into a statue too, cement for lungs and plaster for skin. “Who are they?” she asks on an exhale.

  


“Lodge Industries investors.”

  


“Okay.” She doesn't know what to say. Her intuition was right. It was her fault. She has to tell Betty. She has to tell Jughead. She has to tell -- oh,  _ God _ .

  


Archie had said it himself, she tries to reason -- “ _ Either way, Ronnie, it's not your fault. _ ” But his saying that in the dead of night without confirmation or assurance is different than how he might react to the vindicated truth; that his two best friends in the entire world nearly died because of her.

  


“Veronica,” her father says. He clenches his hands together tight, the skin going taut around his knuckles. Veronica feels guilty. Not for anything she actually did, but for what she isn't doing. Which is protecting the people she cares about. And answering her father. “We want to send you to New York to stay with your abuelita for awhile.”

  


That makes Veronica's head snap up. “I'm sorry?” She says, and her voice sounds irrationally shrill even to her own ears, the noise reverberating through the acoustics in the chapel. “No. I won't go,” she declares with instantaneous finality, not caring that she's showing blatant disobedience right in front of Jesus and Mary. She shakes her head. “No.”

  


“We need to keep you safe,” Hiram argues, “and that won't be possible when we're fighting what could quite literally become an all out war.”

  


“So you think the solution is to make me disappear? We might as well be saying,  _ 'your scare tactics worked.’ _ I'm not leaving, Daddy, and if you send me to Abuelita’s, I'll run away and come right back to Riverdale.” She shifts her gaze back to the statue. “Let me help,” she says. “This is my--”

  


“Absolutely not,” Hiram snaps, every muscle locked. “You can stay in Riverdale, fine. We'll assign a bodyguard to you at all times. But you will  _ not _ be involved in the negotiations.”

  


Veronica side eyes him. There's adrenaline coursing through her and she feels like she could run a marathon. “Negotiations?”

  


“And whatever else we have to do to protect our family and our livelihood.”

  


Hermione is staring up at the Virgin Mary, her gaze fixated and her expression somber. “We're going to battle, Veronica,” she says smoothly, “for you. For the company. To ensure the safety of our entire family.” Finally she looks at her daughter, eyes boring holes into her. Veronica thinks she might actually throw up, right here on the velvet carpet in the hospital chapel. “You need to think about what needs to be done to ensure the safety of your friends. And,” she says frankly, “Archie.”

  


“If you're with your abuelita, it's likely that these terrorists would be less inclined to make examples out of them,” Hiram adds.

  


That makes Veronica explode. “Give up Lodge Industries!” She exclaims, and her parents look at her like she's got three heads. “These people tried to kill my friends! They almost succeeded! Why aren't you taking them seriously?!”

  


“We  _ are _ taking them seriously, Veronica--”

  


“ _ Don't. _ ”

  


That stops them. It stops her too, as a matter of fact, like there's no further explanation required, and the entire chapel is suddenly silent. Veronica is scared out of her mind, but even more than that, she's angry. She feels it pushing up from somewhere deep inside of her, red and powerful.

  


“You haven't cared about my feelings or asked me how I was doing in  _ years _ ,” she tells her father, piercing. She thinks of broken dams, walls caving in. “You don't talk to me. No one talks to me.  _ About _ me, maybe, but maybe not, even. I wouldn't know, because this is the first time in my life that you've told me something significant.” She glances at Hermione, her gaze darting like a cornered animal. “So, you know, tell your investors I said thanks for getting me into the club.”

  


“Veronica--” her mother says sharply, but she ignores her, looking at her father instead. This is crazy -- like something out of a melodrama -- but the truth is she's just getting started. Already she feels more powerful than she has in months.

  


“I'm not a moron,” she says, bristling. “I’ve made mistakes, but I'm not generally stupid. You've made it pretty clear that that's how you see me, and that's fine, but I can't just sit here and put on a show and…  _ pretend _ anymore. I've been pretending for years.” She pauses for a second, looks at her mother whose eyes are hard and angry. “And now you're choosing your company over  _ my _ life and the lives of  _ my _ friends!”

  


“Veronica,” says Hiram. His face has gone dark as a tomato, his eyebrows drawn together in a thick line. “Calm down.”

  


“I  _ can't _ ,” she shoots back, but even as the words come out she can feel her voice start to break. God, she doesn't want to cry -- crying now is going to make her look crazy, is going to undermine everything she's trying to say -- but she can't help it. She's so hugely tired of carrying all of this inside her, all her guilt and anger and loneliness. She can't do it anymore. It's too much. “I'm sorry if I disappoint you, Daddy, and I'm sorry I don't feel the same loyalty to Lodge Industries that you do and that you think I'm a liability and an idiot and every other awful thing,” she's sobbing now, and her mother's lovely face is blurry and distorted through her tears. “And maybe I deserve it and maybe I don't but the point is that my loyalty lies with  _ the people I love _ . Innocent people. And I don't know what I did wrong when I was twelve years old and started wondering about the business, and then you stopped caring about me, stopped checking on me, stopped wanting to be around me, but I wish you would just forgive me already. How can you be my parents and not forgive me?” She shakes her head, and there's not a single thing she can do to calm down. “I mean it! Why did you only love me when I was blind?”

  


She turns on her mother. “And  _ ensure the safety of Archie and my friends _ ? Really? Like the answer isn't obvious? Like the answer is anything other than the fact that  _ you aren't taking these investors seriously _ ? And don't try to tell me you are, because if you were, you would have given up Lodge Industries hours ago.” She pushes past them, heading for the door and into a blinding shock of light without another word.

  


* * *

  


  


Archie is in the waiting room when she bursts into it, aiming for the exit. The sight of him could make her jump out of her skin if she wasn't still so heated from the ordeal in the chapel.

  


“Veronica,” he begins, standing up, alarm and concern etched across every single one of his features when he sees her. “What's--”

  


She swipes at her eyes. “Can I have the car keys?” She asks. “Can you get a ride home with your dad?” It feels selfish to ask, but she needs to get far away from this place, and she doesn't want Archie to get hurt by the storm erupting inside her.

  


Archie holds out the keys, but says, “Veronica, whatever happened, please talk to me about it. Or let me--”

  


She takes the keys and makes for the doors, and he stays glued to her heels across the expanse of the parking lot. He catches the driver's side door just as she's about to slam it, and she grimaces.

  


“I almost took your fingers off.”

  


“It's okay. Got quick reflexes.”

  


She blinks and sits back, and he opens the door wider, maneuvers himself in between so she can't try and close it again. “Let me come with you, okay?”

  


She shakes her head, sniffling. “This is a long ride.”

  


“That's okay.”

  


“I'm doing the highway with no destination.”

  


“I don't mind.”

  


Her insides feel like they've been hollowed out. She doesn't know how things got so out of control. She shrugs and wipes her face, jerks her head toward the passenger side. “Then get in,” she tells him.

  


They're ten minutes onto the freeway before either of them says anything, and when he does his voice is quiet, the ocean at low tide. “Did something happen with your mom and dad?”

  


“I am very, very disappointing to my family,” she says quietly. She concentrates on the road and tries to sound collected, matter-of-fact, resigned. She's humiliated to have cried the way she did, tries to reason that it was a long time coming but can't even empathize with herself. “And they're disappointing to me, actually. They want to send me to New York to stay with my grandmother until everything blows over. They think I'll be safer.”

  


Archie shakes his head. “They want you in New York with no one to protect you except her?” He scrubs at his hair with restless hands.

  


“It might put you in less danger,” she says calmly, “if the people who sent the box try to come after you to make a point.” She had to say it, but still she tries to shutter the notion out, like maybe if she keeps driving forever, nothing will ever be able to hurt him. If Archie died, the sun would go out. Period.

  


“It's not my life that's in danger,” Archie refutes. “I'm going to protect you, Veronica, and you shouldn't be worrying about me.”

  


“How could I not?” She whispers. She almost tells him that her father confirmed the cause of Betty and Jughead's accident. Keeping that secret is like having hot burning coals under her bare feet, though it's been less than half an hour. “I can't do anything that puts your life at risk. I wouldn't be able to take it, and your family--” she trails off, swallowing, afraid she'll start crying again.

  


Archie reaches over to hold her hand. “You're my family, too.”

  


They drive for over an hour, not really talking. Archie hums under his breath. It feels peaceful to be in the car with him, steadying, like he and Veronica are in their own little world, totally unbothered by the one rolling by outside. She knows eventually she'll have to go back and face the music,but she finally feels something akin to calm, and Archie's breathing beside her, and for awhile it's nice to pretend.

  


Eventually, she pulls into his driveway and they say passing greetings to Fred as they walk by him at the entryway. They go up to his room and Veronica listens to him play his guitar, the notes pouring out like rain from the heavens. Her eyes burn and she presses the heel of her hand against her forehead as she tries to forget about what happened. Forgetting feels like a constant goal. She hopes there will come a day she'll actually want to remember.

  


After awhile, she touches his hands, makes him put his guitar down. She pulls him onto the bed. The sun is setting outside and she kisses him, tugs at the hem of his shirt, which makes him pull back to look at her. His eyes turn a deep topaz color, birthstones in the dark. “Are you sure?” he asks, and his voice is low.

  


“Yes.” She's surprised at the steadiness of her own voice. His fingers clench and unclench; she takes one of his fists and forces it open, places her own hand inside. “I'm sure.” Outside, through the open window, she can hear rain starting to fall. Her spine hits the sheets softly.

  


Archie hums around her temple and the curve of his neck feels familiar. She gets her arms around him to keep from flying apart at her joints and they're holding onto each other like it's the last day when all of a sudden, all at once, Archie goes completely still.

  


“Tell me this isn't your way of saying goodbye,” he orders quietly. He's not moving at all.

  


“Hmm?” she says into his shoulder. She looks up. He's balancing on his forearms as he hovers over her. “What?”

  


“Tell me you're not thinking you're going to die and this is -- you're not going to die, Veronica. Just -- tell me,” he repeats, and in the dark flash of his eyes she can see this is very important to him, some kind of promise he's made to himself. He doesn't want her to make him do this without saying the words. “Ronnie.” He's almost pleading. “Say it.”

  


_ Don't do this to me _ , she wants to say. “Archie,” she murmurs, thumb skating across his eyebrow, trying to stall. “Come on.”

  


He looks right at her. “Say it.”

  


Her heart is knocking away inside her chest. “I can't,” she whispers finally. “I'm sorry.”

  


He closes his eyes for a second and she braces, fully expecting him to roll away from her. But then:

  


“Okay,” Archie says on a long, quiet exhale. She can feel his ribs expand and contract against her chest. “It's okay.”

  


“We can stop if you want,” she offers, head swimming. “I get it if you want to stop.”

  


Archie smiles down at her, quick and vanishing. “I don't want to stop.”

  


So they keep going.

  


It's vaguely heartbreaking to do this after all that's happened, the telltale hitches in his breathing and the way her entire body tenses, the things they haven't done since everything went to hell forty eight hours ago. The back of his knee is warm when she tucks her foot there. His hand is cool when he wraps it around her wrists on the pillow above her head. He looks at her the whole entire time.

  


When it's over they lie on their sides facing each other for what might be days, streetlamps and the sound of the wind in the trees outside the window. She feels the weight of his gaze like something physical, a sheen of sweat coating her skin. Finally she can't hold it in anymore; just breathing is like a hurricane. “Seattle,” she says.

  


He raises one eyebrow. “Seattle?”

  


“I think ' _ everywhere _ ’ should start in Seattle.”

  


He smiles at her, and they both turn onto their backs, their bodies pressed together as closely as possible.

  


Veronica breathes in and Archie joins her, and he can see her smiling even though he's looking straight up at the ceiling. They exhale together, then inhale together, exhale, inhale, in, out, until not even the walls of their homes remember what's happened this week.

  


“Seattle it is,” he tells her like a certainty, and they fall asleep after that.

  


* * *

  


  


When Veronica gets home her father is in the kitchen cooking rice and chicken, skinless and low-fat. “Hi,” she says.

  


Her father nods at her, impassive.

  


“I was at Archie's,” she tells him.

  


“So I heard,” he nods again.

  


“I spent the night,” she continues.

  


“So I heard.” Mother of God, he nods a third time.

  


_ Oh, come off it,  _ she almost snaps. Instead she takes a deep breath, steadying. “All right,” she says, surrendering. No one in her family is much of an emoter, but her father can out-silence anybody, including Veronica. “Can we address this situation?”

  


“What's that?”

  


That makes her mad. “You know what,” she says, an edge in her voice she can't totally file down. “Everything we talked about at the hospital yesterday. All of this.”

  


Her father sets the knife down and it clatters loudly into the basin, making her jump. “Veronica, I don't see what there is to talk about. You know how your mother and I feel. We can try our best to keep you safe, but ultimately, you make your own choices.” This morning’s paper sits on the table, and he opens it to the international news. The wooden box is gone. “There's food,” he says, without looking up.

  


“Okay,” she says finally, and slowly leaves the room. 

  


Not so long ago, in her English class, they read about the Renaissance and how, for a long time afterward, it was almost impossible for Italian artists to make anything. All that history already there, they figured. What was the point?


	4. Chapter 4

“ _This nightmare will be over soon_ ,” Hiram swears to Veronica before he and Hermione get in a car with Andre. They're going to church, then to the airport to meet with the top dogs of the coup in New York. To negotiate.

 

Hiram sets a hand on his daughter's shoulder and shuts his eyes to silently pray over her just before they leave. She can't blame him: his own parents were deeply involved in the church, and he was practically half raised by the nuns in the local chapel. He fully intended to become a priest until he met Hermione; he confesses every other Friday and keeps a Saint Christopher medal tucked inside his suit jacket. In his outward life he's deadly dangerous, but his heart and soul are that of the most serious of altar boys, and the fact that he didn't ship Veronica off to some convent this week is probably a testament to the mercy of God, as far as she's concerned.

 

Finally they leave. She feels trapped and anxious in the Pembrooke by herself, a ghost haunting its empty rooms. She tries to sketch out some clothing designs for a few minutes, but finally she gives up and stops tormenting herself -- the blank paper like a sweeping accusation from the person she used to be in New York, all the things she said she was going to do and didn't. For a second she's back at Park Avenue on the night her father was arrested, every careful plan for her future scattered like hayseed in a dry wind.

 

Still -- Riverdale has been better for her than she ever imagined possible, all things considered. Archie makes her feel like all the mistakes she's made are okay, like all the things she hates about herself -- her callousness, her inability to fix her family's morality, the way her mind jumps immediately to judgement; like the mean thing to say is always on the tip of her tongue, and she has to swallow that poison down so often she thinks she may actually choke on it -- are redeemable. Like maybe one day she can actually be a good person. When she’s with him, she feels like she can push all her anger, fear, and guilt into a tiny room, turn off the lights, and close the door.

 

His proposition that they cut their losses and just go after graduation makes sense to her. Even before he said it, she remembers thinking how strange it was that she and Archie were headed to the same University as every other high schooler in the state -- how _pedestrian,_ as if the two of them should be headed for pastures way greener than keg parties and freshman seminars on the history of Western civilization. They should be haunting cafés in New York or playing open mics in California, speeding down clear expanses of highway in the middle of the country, with no particular destination in mind.

 

The idea that she may be killed and never get a chance to do all those things -- become good, explore the world -- makes her feel like she's shriveling up on the inside. She stares at the wall and decides she needs to get out of this apartment _now._ So she pulls the keys to her father's second car from the hook by the door.

 

The roads are pretty empty at this hour, the darkened silhouettes of maple trees studding the landscape and the red glow of scattered tail lights. The windshield fogs up a bit, and she swipes at it with the flat of her palm as she pulls into Pop's. When she gets out, she watches a plane flying overhead, blinking lights, larger than life, all of that coming and going and her just exactly where she's been for the last six months.

 

Inside she orders fries without event and stares around at the diner, restless. She drinks water by the counter. She pulls out her phone and sees that it's dead, slides it back into her bag -- her whole life a holding pattern, some variation on _sorry, try again later_.

 

Finally she goes back to the car and mentally curses herself for forgetting to lock the door as she gets in. Veronica shivers. Sitting here alone in the car isn’t really her brightest move, and she shifts, out of sorts and aching. She doubts anyone would try something in the parking lot of the most popular diner in town, but she peers around anyway. Nothing but a handful of parked cars. Still, her skin prickles like someone is watching her. She locks the doors.

 

At the other end of the lot, headlights suddenly blare and a van’s engine growls to life, and instead of moving toward the exit, it turns into the row of cars where Veronica is parked. It gets closer and closer, and her hands shake as she grabs her bag and digs deep down to find the keys.

 

No go. The van stops just a few spaces away from her and she gasps for breath as she reaches for the overhead light and pushes the switch. Nothing. In desperation, she overturns her bag on the passenger seat and rifles through her papers and wallet and whatever the hell else she's got in there until her fingers finally connect with cool metal. She fumbles with the keys, trying to push them into the ignition.

 

Success on the third try. The car roars to life.

 

When she looks up, the van is gone.

 

* * *

 

 

By the time she gets home, her breathing is almost back to normal. If her father's investors are trying to send her into cardiac arrest, they're well on their way. All she wants to do is call Betty for some tea and sympathy -- minus the tea -- but considering she’s made her best friend intentionally oblivious to the target on her back, that conversation is a nonstarter. The minute she gets into the apartment, she hears her dad's voice boom, “Veronica, get in here! Now!”

 

 _Great._ She makes her way toward the kitchen, past the multitude of black and white family portraits -- her mother's work all up and down the wall. When Veronica was a little girl she used to let her take pictures with her heavy 35mm, showed her how to develop them in the darkroom she'd had set up in their powder room on Park Avenue. She remembers feeling so nervous to mess up around her mother that her hands would shake as she tried to hold the camera, a whole roll of blurry, focusless shots.

 

In the kitchen, her mother is glaring down at her vodka and tonic and avoiding Veronica's eyes. Hiram’s stormy gaze, on the other hand, has no problem latching onto hers. “How is it that I have to find out from Archie Andrews that my own daughter isn't picking up her phone, isn't in the apartment, and hasn't told anyone what she's doing, which, apparently includes stealing the car and going out _alone,_ forcing us to race home from church and miss the flight that's supposed to take us to critical negotiations, just to ensure she isn't _dead_ \--”

 

Veronica interrupts. “I was afraid to be here alone,” she says, “and I didn't want to make things worse by calling you.”

 

“ _Veronica_.” His voice rises suddenly, and she thinks of Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of God and the burning bush. “Worse would be having something happen to you. How can your mother and I protect you if we don't know what's going on?”

 

Hermione's hand trembles as she takes a big sip of her drink. “You wanted us to take the investors seriously. That’s what we’re trying to do, and now you pull something like this. Did anything strange happen while you were out?” she demands.

 

“No,” she lies. Her stomach clenches and she leans against the counter for support.

 

Hiram pinches the bridge of his nose. “We live in a sick society, Veronica. If anything happens, you tell us immediately, even if you don't think it matters. Understood?”

 

“Yes,” she says, even as she wonders how keeping anyone safe is possible.

 

“Check the security alarm and the locks every time you enter the house. Be careful when you leave. Always lock the doors and windows.”

 

“Daddy, I know all that.” She tries not to sound impatient, even as guilt works its way through her about forgetting to lock the car at Pop's.

 

“Text me every day when you get to school, when you're leaving, and when you get home, so I know you're okay. Are we clear?”

 

“Crystal.”

 

“I don't know what's going on with you, Veronica, but I'm telling you right now, you need to put a stop to it before you get killed. You're on very thin ice here. Now call Archie. He's out there looking for you.”

 

“ _What_?” Veronica's stomach drops, but before she has time to go ballistic, the doorbell is ringing incessantly, and she races to open it, her father attached to her heels. Archie comes bursting in, looking worn and wound.

 

“My God, Ronnie,” he breathes, and then he's got his arms around her, holding her tight. His shirt is warm and soft against her cheek. She feels herself calm down as soon as he touches her, lets herself sink into it, his mouth at her temple.

 

Hiram allows them to go to her room; “ _Maybe he can talk some sense into you."_

 

She shuts the door behind her and looks at her bed but can't bring herself to sit down. Her whole body is shaking and he runs his palm up and down her arm -- she feels tense from the tips of her ears all the way down to her ankles.

 

“Something happened while you were out, right?” Archie asks, looking at her with concern, and with that lingering hint of panic he had when he got here.

 

She's surprised he's noticed, actually, that he's tuned-in enough to be able to tell. She's not used to that kind of attention. She's a little disbelieving, as if there's some invisible string keeping she and Archie tethered to each other, and it's tightening, a slipknot hooked around her wrist.

 

She shakes her head. “No,” she bluffs, eyes a little wide, “I'm fine.” Then she says, “Archie--” and opens her mouth to tell him the truth, but when her answer comes, it's from somewhere deep inside her, a place she didn't even know existed, some small hidden place that wouldn't even show up on a map. “I think I need to leave Riverdale by myself.”

 

Um.

 

“ _What?_ ” For a second he looks totally and completely baffled, like she's speaking a language he's never heard before, staring at her like he's been blindsided. And why wouldn't he be? Fifteen seconds ago she said she was fine.

 

As soon as it's out of her mouth though she knows it's true, like whatever she's trying to do here, trying to outrun death, isn't working. Like she's been trying to force a key inside a lock that doesn't fit. “I'm sitting here waiting for them to kill me.”

 

“Veronica, that's not going to happen,” Archie says, his voice rising just a little. He pushes his hand through his hair in frustration, and she notices it's gotten slightly longer. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that things change whether you're around to notice them or not.

 

Veronica is pacing now, thinking about how the investors tried to kill her friends. _You don't understand_ , she wants to tell him. It's so much bigger than just a threat on _her_ life. It's all of them. It was Betty and Jughead just a  couple days ago. But how _could_ he understand, really? She's never bothered to explain, and even now, she keeps her feelings clutched close.

 

The worst part is, she can see it. She can see herself doing all the right things, answering Archie's calls and locking the front door and keeping her guard up until her parents do the wrong thing and their investors kill him as another warning. Make it look like an accident. Make her entire world crumble to ashes right in front of her. She can see it all laid out, neat and small and suffocating, and it makes her want to scream like nothing else she has ever experienced.

 

“There's no other solution,” she manages, voice shaking. God, already she's thinking there's an outside chance she's the stupidest person alive. “My parents met the people who sent the box. They're investors in Lodge Industries. They made Betty and Jughead crash.”

 

Archie looks at her for a moment like she's wrecked him. A tiny part of her hopes he'll walk away, forget she ever existed, because at least then he'll be safe. For a minute he's silent, but then he just says, “Tell me what happened tonight.”

 

She closes her eyes hard. Finally, she's done playing Lone Ranger. She fills him in on what happened at Pop's and watches as his eyebrows shoot up so fast she thinks they might be in danger of springing off his head entirely.

 

He cards his fingers through his hair again. “Why didn't you answer my calls, Veronica?”

 

“My phone died,” she says crisply. “And I didn't know you were coming over.” She stares up at the ceiling and now it's his turn to pace. She tracks his orbit out of the corner of her eye, back and forth.

 

“Have you thought about finishing this semester from home?” he asks. “Where you'll be safe? Or at least until this is over? Because running off on your own is the opposite of the right solution.”

 

“Archie, the thought of spending all my time in this tomb of a house while everyone else is at school or work is more horrifying than dealing with my assassins.”

 

“Damn it, Veronica,” Archie says, suddenly explosive. He looks like he's possibly considering breaking something.

 

She pushes back her tears and her voice shakes. “I won't spend my life locked up, figuratively or literally. I won't do it. Period.” She wipes at her nose with a forearm.

 

He swallows hard, a vein pulsing in his neck. He looks at a spot above her head. “You should have answered the phone.”

 

“I told you, my phone--”

 

“Do you know how scared I was?” Archie's jaw is quivering, and he suddenly looks dangerously close to tears. “Are you deliberately trying to get yourself killed?”

 

Oh.

 

Veronica's stomach drops.

 

He swallows a bit like she's defeated him, and all at once she's surprised by how it doesn't feel like a victory at all. But before she has a chance to comfort him or apologize, he's brushing past her and leaving, so fast, like maybe she's on fire and she's just too stupid to notice and save herself.

 

She tries to keep her reaction as neutral as humanly possible and feels certain she's made things so much worse. She has a midterm in English tomorrow. Before she started at Riverdale High, she imagined the class would be full of lively, sophisticated conversation about the great writers of the last few generations; instead the lecture is delivered by a fleshy middle-aged teacher who's not so much boring as he is blatantly _bored_. He always eyes Veronica with vague pity through an owly pair of glasses and periodically administers multiple choice quizzes she's fairly certain he's printing off the internet. “ _You are my penance for a misspent life_ ,” he'd announced on the first day of school, before assigning _A Raisin in the Sun_ and two books by John Updike and pretty much washing his hands of his students completely.

 

Veronica hears Archie slam his car door shut on the street down below, hears the truck engine roar to life and listens to him drive away. She grabs a textbook and sits down to study, if only to distract herself from the tears pooling in her eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

Archie doesn't believe in gut feelings.

 

So when he wakes up and his chest is in knots of tension and anxiety, he tries not to think about it too much. But what happens at school that day makes him rethink his opinion about gut feelings for the rest of his life.

 

It's a pipe bomb. It goes off in the student lounge, where Veronica is standing still and calm, the first of her friends to arrive. Betty and Jughead are coming back today. There are a few other people around, but none that she knows.

 

When it happens, it happens quickly. Instantly. No time to scream, or see her life flash before her eyes, or anything she might imagine happening in a scenario like this. All she sees is shrapnel hurtling toward her like the angel of death on speed. Her line of vision hurtling down toward the floor.

 

Then the sounds. Metal splintering into a thousand pieces. Invisible force knocking into her chest. Her head slamming against something solid. Hard.

 

Finally, a shuddering stop. So dizzy. Everything around her swims. Distortion. She lets her heavy head rest against the ground and closes her eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

The blame is quickly pinned on the Southside Serpents, who vehemently deny any involvement. _“Look what I found in psycho Jones’ backpack,”_ Reggie says, holding up a folded piece of paper. _“A diagram. Instructions for making this exact kind of bomb.”_ Or, well, Archie would learn later on that Reggie said that. But in the moment, he isn't concerned with Reggie. Isn't anywhere near him, in fact -- he’s in the truck, speeding after the ambulance carrying Veronica.

 

Archie feels like a hostage going haywire from sheer fear and panic as he paces the waiting room. When Betty and Jughead were hospitalized, he was just scared. But with Veronica behind closed doors, he thinks he may claw out of his skin.

 

Hiram and Hermione are trying desperately to get out of New York, to get back to Riverdale, but there are complications. Either way, they're not here, though they might as well be breathing down Archie's neck the way everyone's talking about them, wondering why it's taking so long for them to change their flight. The waiting room is full, the stuffy heat of packed bodies overcoming the industrial air conditioning.

 

He's surrounded by pretty much everyone he cares about except for the person who matters the most because she's busy possibly _dying_ , and the embrace that Betty and Jughead wrap him in should be comforting and familiar, but instead it feels like being in a dream where he's someplace he recognizes but it looks strangely different, everything just a degree or two off from true north. He extricates himself, doesn't feel like being touched. All he wants is for no one to talk to him for the foreseeable future.

 

He imagines what might have happened at school today if nothing had gone wrong, if there had never been any investors threatening Veronica's life. If he hadn't yelled at her and left without saying he loved her or cared about her or making sure she was okay; instead he accused her of trying to get herself killed when she must have been terrified, and _of course_ now that might be the last thing he ever gets to say to her. But if none of that had happened, she might have greeted him with the smile she seems to reserve only for him, and he would have felt like he was weightless when she would have kissed him, because that's what happens when Veronica Lodge turns her kinetic energy on him; it's like he's standing in a puddle of sun. It's one of the reasons he loves her so much.

 

He has no clue how to go on without her, and more than that, he has absolutely no desire to learn.

 

The morning melts by, as does every stray thought Archie has ever had about anything other than how desperately he needs Veronica. He knows the blankness of his expression is making everyone wonder if there's anything beating and alive beneath it at all, but he can't even answer that question himself.

 

Eventually Jughead nudges him. “How are you holding up?”

 

Archie blinks at him, distracted, still gazing at the double doors leading into the ER. “I'm not.”

 

Jughead nods like _that's fair,_ then says “Archie, I promise you -- this wasn't the Serpents.”

 

Archie gets a bad taste in his mouth. He knows it wasn't the Serpents. He knows exactly who did this. “Are they really trying to pin the blame on you, Jug?”

 

Jughead scowls. “There's no evidence other than that stupid planted diagram. And my alibi is solid.” He looks at Archie then, his expression softening. “She's gonna be okay, Arch.”

 

Archie swallows and sits back in his unforgivingly hard plastic chair. “Veronica and I had… _a talk_ last night.”

 

“The _I know you're really Catholic but this is where babies come from_ talk?” Jughead tries to lighten the mood, blue eyes going wide.

 

Archie can't even muster a smile. “I was mean to her.” His shoulders drift up toward his ears like he hadn't wanted to admit that and he's annoyed Jughead got it out of him. He stares straight ahead, not a hint of anything to reveal what he's thinking to the world. He thinks he might spend the rest of his life in a sinkhole of guilt and confusion and sadness. Thinks there's no limit to the ways he's managed to fail Veronica since they met.

 

Jughead looks at him sympathetically. “Archie, you know it's--”

 

“Archie Andrews?” A doctor finally pushes through the doors and comes out to speak to them, and when he stands, he's so drained he feels boneless, barely able to hold up his own weight, but then the doctor says, “Ms. Lodge is stable and awake. She's asking for you,” and he stumbles after him down a maze of blinding hallways until he reaches Veronica's room.

 

Everything about his girl is all edge, and he would never use the words, _weak_ or _breakable_ to describe her, but lying there in the hospital bed… Veronica looks nothing but innocent. Any impulse he has to scream “What the fuck?” or “What happened?” or “Are you all right?” vanishes, and for a long moment, all they do is rest in each other's silence. In each other's confused, exhausted, _what are we doing in this room_ eyes.

 

He barely pays any attention to anything else about her, except that she's _there_. And then she's in his arms. It's not the most comfortable position because she's laying in a hospital bed and he's perched on the edge of it, but it doesn't matter. He doesn't plan on ever letting go again.

  
  
"I love you," he mumbles against her jawline, repeats the sentiment against her cheek and her ear and her lips. She smells wrong, like dust and the hospital, but she feels strong and warm like always.

 

“Sorry that was a long wait for you,” she murmurs, clearly exhausted. “Took me awhile to wake up. The drugs they gave me--”

 

“Shh,” he hushes her softly, kisses the back of her knuckles. “I would've waited my entire life.”

 

She smiles a little and sniffs. “Meet anyone interesting in the waiting room?”

 

He's not sure exactly why they're having this conversation, but it occurs to him that he doesn't really care: he'll talk to Veronica about anything she wants. “Didn't exactly feel like chatting. One guy tried to talk to me. He said his name was Animal; and that his real name was Peter, but that you can't be in a rock-and-roll band with a name like Peter, or something.”

 

“Sure you can,” Veronica counters, slitting her eyes open to look at him. She's still holding his hand. “What about Pete Townshend?”

 

“Okay, well--”

 

“Pete Seeger.”

 

“Yeah, but--”

 

“Peter, Paul, and Mary.”

 

“Peter, Paul, and Mary were not a rock-and-roll band!” Archie exclaims, laughing.

 

“But they sang about drugs.” Veronica is clearly enjoying herself. “So if Animal’s argument is that people named Peter are too uptight for drug-type singing, then Peter of Peter, Paul, and Mary clearly illustrates otherwise.”

 

They lapse into a brief silence during which Archie is working up the guts to talk about what happened between them last night, but Veronica looks at him like she can tell what he's thinking and she doesn't like the trajectory the conversation is about to take; so she bends it to her will.

 

“Talk about something else,” she says, staring right at him. “I don't want to think about the explosion, or the investors, or any of it.”

 

Archie squeezes her hand again, looks at her, thinking for a moment. He wants to apologize, but he also doesn't want her to feel more stressed or afraid than she already does. “What does your name mean?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“' _Veronica_.’ What does 'Veronica’ mean?”

 

“ _She who brings victory,_ ” Veronica replies. “And also, _true image_.”

 

Archie nods his approval and smiles a little. “Ever look me up?”

 

She smiles back. “Not yet.”

 

* * *

 

 

Doctors proclaim she has a concussion before deciding she's going to be better off at home, where she can rest. Hiram and Hermione are still out of town, and the earliest flight they can get is scheduled for the morning after next, and Archie will be damned if Veronica goes back to the Pembrooke alone. So he drives her back to his house and helps her walk up the driveway, up the stairs, down the hall into his bedroom. It takes forever, because every step hurts her and they have to go slow and take breaks.

 

Veronica stares toward the bathroom, unsure whether she can handle a shower on her own.

 

"I'll help you," Archie says, guessing at what she's thinking.

 

They make the trip into the bathroom. While the water heats up, Archie helps Veronica get out of her clothes and together they take in the sight of her body, battered with bruises all down the left side.

 

He undresses and leads her into the shower. "Let me know if anything hurts," he says.

  
  
"I feel kind of numb right now," Veronica admits. "But closing my eyes makes me feel dizzy."

 

"Okay," Archie says cautiously, "Just hold onto me."

  
He runs the soap over her body, washing her clean with extreme caution, scrubbing the blood and dust from her hair. For a minute they just hold each other under the running water as the soap gets rinsed off.

  
By the time they get out they're both clean, and Veronica feels more worn out than she did before. They end up in his bed in a tangle of limbs, their breath soft in the dark. The world outside is quiet, like all the wind has gone still.

 

That night, Veronica falls asleep thinking about God. Even when things go wrong, she's always believed in holy power, and though her religion is incidental to whatever is going on here, her faith has been written into the very cells of her DNA since the day she was born, when every member of her family crowded into a hospital room to pray over her life. To thank God for her life. She wonders about the events that have crisscrossed to bring her to this place. How much of it is fate, and how much of it is her fault? How much control does she really have over her life?

 

A few weeks ago, she felt good about the course her life was taking. But now that her immaculate house of cards has collapsed, she has to wonder what did it.

 

Was it her father?

 

Was it her mother?

 

Was it Riverdale?

 

Or was it her -- from the moment she was born -- falling, failing, gasping for air -- her?

 

* * *

 

 

It feels like Archie has barely closed his eyes before the sun is streaming in through the windows and someone is pounding on the door. He stumbles out of bed and down the stairs and flings it open, his dad coming up behind him. "What?" he growls, rubbing his eyes.

  
"I need to talk to you and Veronica," Sheriff Keller says wearily, like he really doesn't want to be doing this.

 

"Veronica is in bed. Sleeping. How can I help you?" Archie asks like he's daring the Sheriff to tell him to go wake her up.

  
  
"Both of you need to be here," he says, pushing his way into the house. He's followed by Kevin, Jughead, and Betty, the latter of which gives him an apologetic look.

  
  
"How is he?" Archie asks quietly, holding her back as they watch Jughead head into the living room.

  
  
"Not spiraling," she says, clearly relieved. “And Sheriff Keller says he's not a suspect as of now, despite what Reggie accused him of.” Veronica appears on the staircase then, knuckles wrapped tightly around the banister, looking wrecked.

  
Archie helps her make her way to the couch as Keller politely asks how she's feeling. Archie notices how carefully she lowers herself down, thinks about how much pain she must be in.

  
  
"I'm sorry to come here so early, but it couldn't wait," Keller says specifically to Veronica before turning to face Archie as well. “We found Hiram and Hermione Lodge's fingerprints on the debris from the bomb.”

 

Archie glances at Veronica, and the look that passes between them lets him know they're thinking the same thing: that the investors are trying to frame her parents.

 

“They have an alibi; they were out of the state. So while we can be confident that they didn't personally plant the bomb, we're opening an investigation to see if they had anything to do with building it.” Sheriff Keller side eyes Archie now, like he's bracing for some fit he knows he's about pitch. “And, Veronica -- like I said, I'm sorry to do this, but we have no choice but to consider the possibility that -- well, that you may have planted it.”

 

That has Archie practically apoplectic. He gets to his feet. “Are you kidding me, Sheriff Keller?”

 

Jughead and Betty get to their feet too, angry. “What the hell, Keller?” Jughead says. “You said you were just going to ask Veronica what she remembers.”

 

Archie feels acid rising up in his throat as his anger dawns bright and harsh. “Are you actually theorizing that Veronica risked killing herself so she could set off a bomb in a practically empty room? _Are you kidding me?_ ” he repeats, and there is a moment where he forgets anyone else is there. It's just Sheriff Keller and him, fighting over insinuations about the girl he loves.

 

“Archie, listen,” Keller begins, “I need to take Veronica down to the station for questioning, and you can come if you want. It will only be about an hour--”

 

Archie interrupts him. “Is she under arrest?”

 

“Of course not.”

 

“Then that would be an illegal detention,” he says, quick as a whip. He learned that from his mom. “I think you need to leave now, Sheriff Keller. Get out of my house and go find whoever _actually_ tried to kill Veronica. Because right now all you're doing is proving that you're _really_ bad at your job.”

 

But then, from behind him comes Veronica's voice. “I'll go in for questioning, Sheriff Keller.”

 

“No,” Archie snaps.

 

“ _Excuse me_?” Veronica shoots back. “Though I had nothing to do with the bombing, I have no problem with clearing up the confusion,” she adds smoothly. Of the two of them, Veronica is apparently the only one with a modicum of grace, not that this comes as any sort of revelation to Archie.

 

Sheriff Keller smiles at her gratefully, but Archie says, “I don't give a shit. You need to be here. Resting.”

 

"Can you excuse us for a minute?" Veronica asks. She pushes herself up slowly, walks stiffly to the staircase, and doesn't let Archie help her as she makes her way to his bedroom, where she slams the door shut, leaving the two of them alone again.

  
  
"You're not going," he says again, even though he knows it's not his choice.

 

"Yes I am."

  
  
"No you're not!" Archie explodes, and for a moment they're back in her room the night before the bombing. "God damn it Veronica, why won't you let me keep you safe?! Look at yourself! You can barely get out of bed and you think you're up to going to the Sheriff's station? You could have died yesterday, and now he's accusing you of doing it yourself. It's bullshit.”

 

“I agree, but what about the police force in Riverdale isn't? Archie, if I don't do this, it's going to make me look suspicious. Clearly, the investors want to frame my family, and I'm not going to be insolent and uncooperative to add fuel to whatever fire they're trying to build.”

 

He stares at her for a long minute before he huffs out a breath and slumps against the dresser. “I can't handle this without you," he says, gesturing like maybe 'this' means life itself, the world at large. "I already knew that, but nothing felt real until yesterday when I was in the hospital waiting for someone to come out and tell me whether or not you were still alive.”

 

She's quiet. “I don't want to go,” she says finally.

 

"Then don't," Archie says quickly, hoping to stem the rest of the words he knows are coming.

  
  
"I have to."

  
  
"He can question you here.”

 

“You know that's not going to happen.”

 

He sighs, finally running up the white flag. “Alright. Let's just get through today,” he says heavily, pushing himself away from the dresser. “We should get ready.”

 

“Hey,” Veronica says, reaching out for him and reeling him back in. She kisses him softly. “It’s going to be okay. I love you.”

 

Archie closes his eyes and rests his forehead against hers. “I love you too,” he says quietly.

 

* * *

 

 

The questioning takes longer than Sheriff Keller predicted, mostly because he has to run off to tend to some other crime that gets called in on his walkie talkie, and Veronica, Archie, Betty, and Jughead have to sit in the lobby for what feels like days before he finally comes back and proceeds to ask her relentless questions about things that seem completely irrelevant. Oh, and of course he repeatedly says, “ _This is all just procedural, Veronica. You're not a suspect._ ”

 

By the time they leave the sheriff's station, though, that's exactly how she feels. The sun is just starting to set when they decide to go to Betty's house. It's been too long, Veronica says, since they spent anything akin to casual quality time together. _Hospital visits and police investigations aren't how normal friends hang out together._

 

Even still, once there, Veronica can't seem to revel in the gathering. While Archie and Betty and Jughead laugh and eat pizza, she excuses herself for a moment and slips past the kitchen, out the sliding door, and across the covered patio, avoiding the bright patch thrown by the floodlight affixed to the back of the house. She makes straight for the swingset in Betty's backyard, wet from this afternoon's rainstorm.

 

She sits.

 

It's not that she doesn't want to be with them, exactly. That's not what it is at all. She just doesn't know how to do this, all the clang and chatter in the house. Not when Betty and Jughead are still so oblivious to everything that's going on. She's more instinctively afraid of their reaction than she is panicked about it, the way she was taught to be afraid of tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes. _Telling Betty and Jughead they were almost killed because of her: terrifying._

 

It's her fault, she thinks again, swinging slowly back and forth without much of a long term plan. She doesn't know how to tell them. She doesn't--

 

“What are you doing?”

 

Archie sidles across the damp grass, hands in his pockets. She hadn't seen him coming -- he'd edged around the floodlight, too.

 

“Um.” She gropes around for plausible deniability, and finding none, has to settle for the truth. “Hiding.”

 

Archie raises his eyebrows, pauses by the other swing. “From anything in particular?” It's frustratingly dark out here; fine for brooding, sure, but for all the world he wants to pull Veronica into the light and just… _look_.

 

 _Everyone_ , as a matter of fact, but she doesn't say that out loud. “That,” she begins instead, stalling for time, “is a very good question.”

 

It's raining again, just drizzle, almost imperceptible. Neither of them move.

 

Veronica says, “I need to tell them.”

 

Archie says, “I know.” When she looks up, she finds him staring back. “Ronnie,” he says, and it occurs to her that her nickname has seldom been on his lips these last few days. _Veronica,_  he's been saying, because they're being oppressed by this crushing weight of life-and-death gravity, and _Ronnie_ was what he called her when things were okay. When tenderness wasn't tainted by the fear that they were going to lose each other. Back when endearment didn't feel like something that hurt. “I'm sorry.”

 

She rocks back and forth on the swing, slow. She doesn't encourage his apology -- whatever the hell he's sorry for, he shouldn't be. Whatever it is, she already knows that in reality, it's _her_ fault. Whatever it is, she should be the one apologizing.

 

“That night before the explosion. I walked out on you. I said you were trying to get yourself killed, and--” here he pauses, wipes a hand across his forehead to get rid of the raindrops. He looks at her again, his expression wry and heartbroken and honest. “And then you were almost killed. So I'm sorry, Ronnie -- I jinxed it, or something, and I wasn't there to walk you to school, and I wasn't there to protect you when the bomb went off. I promised you I would keep you safe, and then I… didn't.” In that moment he looks so colossally sad, so raw and regretful. “I'm sorry.”

 

They gaze at each other for a moment, the rain still hissing steadily all around them and her heart beating small and whisper-quiet inside her chest. She knows it's her move here, that Archie's told her the worst and most honest thing he can think of. She remembers the fight they had the night before the bombing, how defeated he looked. How defeated he looks now. It doesn't feel like she's won anything at all.

 

“It means true and bold,” she tells him finally, wiping either tears or rain off her face with the back of one cold, damp hand. She doesn't know why it suddenly feels like it matters.

 

Archie physically startles at the response. He looks at her, blinking. “Huh?” he asks.

 

“Your name,” she manages after a moment. “Archie. True and bold.”

 

It’s not what he was hoping for; that much is clear by the way his shoulders sag. Still, he musters a smile. “Wish I fit that description these days,” is all he tells her. Offers a hand to pull her to her feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you guys enjoyed this chapter, please review! I was going to try my hand at some mild-ish smut but I decided to move it to the next chapter, so fair warning.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is M rated. If you've got a problem reading about Archie and Veronica getting it on, skip that part.

Keeping Betty out of the loop has been making Veronica miserable. For the past week she's been going to text her -- for all kinds of reasons, stupid regular stuff, like the new pop song lodging itself deep inside her brain, or to ask her if she wants to go to Pop's together. And, of course, Veronica has been itching to call her every time the house settles or a tree branch rustles, fear that runs like a flattened palm down her spine, making her jumpy and putting her on edge. She's kept Betty in the dark on purpose, but that does nothing to alleviate the emptiness of not having her best friend to tell things to. It's lonelier than any breakup could ever be.

So, when she and Archie walk back inside the house and Betty passes by them on her way to the kitchen, Veronica catches her by the wrist, her fingers curling around the bracelet she's wearing. “Betty,” she starts, then completely fails to follow it up in any meaningful kind of way.

Betty raises her eyebrows, curious. She has a stack of dirty plates in one arm. “What's up, V?”

Veronica hesitates. She wants to ask her how she's feeling; she wants to know how the new article is coming along. She wants to tell her that she's sorry, that she feels like one of those horrible girls that can't make friendships work with other girls, that she misses her and that she didn't mean to endanger her and that she'll do anything she wants to make it up to her. She wants to fix this, but she doesn't know how to do it, doesn't even know how to tell Betty that there's anything that _needs_ fixing. She shakes her head. Jughead and Archie and Betty are all watching her.

“Can I help you wash these?” Veronica backs out at the last possible second, swooping in and whisking the plates away from Betty, carrying them over to the sink. Her best friend follows her.

While Betty fills the sink with soapy water, Veronica rearranges the magnetic letters on the fridge. _BETTY_ , she spells, red and green and yellow. _HOME_.

Betty washes and Veronica dries. “Everything okay?” Betty asks, voice quiet, just loud enough that only they can hear. Archie and Jughead are in the living room, talking in hushed voices, too.

“Hmm?” Veronica asks, stalling, rubbing at a plate with more force than is strictly called for. “I told you the medication already took my headache away.”

Betty works steadily, the efficient sound of sponge scrubbing ceramic. “I don't mean physically,” she says softly, and her eyes drift over to look at Veronica then. “Is everything okay?” she repeats.

“No,” Veronica murmurs, staring at the water swirling down the drain. She feels as trapped as she did the day her father was arrested, like she could burst into flames where she stands and all anybody would say is _Boy, some weather we're having_. Like possibly she doesn't even exist.

She's wrong, though. Betty twists the tap off and turns to her, wraps her in the tightest hug she thinks she's ever felt. _Betty. Home._

“Do we need to go somewhere?” she asks. “To talk?”

Veronica rests her head on Betty's shoulder, unwilling to let go. “This is something I have to tell you and Jughead.” She smells clean and familiar, vanilla and safety, and Veronica breathes her in to try and keep it together. She knows she's going to lose her best friend, sure as if she were moving clear across the world. She knows she's never going to look at her the same way again, and honestly, she's not sure she even wants her to. Still, part of Veronica misses her already, and she wants to soak her up while she still can.

But eventually, Betty pulls back, lays one cool hand on Veronica's cheek like she's checking for a fever, for something she senses but can't prove. “Don't worry, V.”

Veronica tries to smile, tries to tell herself she isn't scared, that the walls aren't pressing in on all sides. “Let's join the boys.”

 

* * *

 

To say Jughead doesn't take Veronica's confession well would be like calling a category five hurricane a little bit of inconvenient drizzle. He yells -- Jesus Christ, he _yells_ at her, all kinds of hateful accusations she would like never to think about again. Archie defends her. Betty cries. And Veronica cries, too.

Then the quiet comes.

After Jughead leaves in a fit of frustration and rage, Archie and Veronica and Betty sit together on the couch. Betty holds Veronica's hand and doesn't say a word, no way to tell what she's thinking. Archie runs his hand up and down her back. They silently do what they can to soothe her, to make her feel less alone; still, she spends the rest of the long foggy night sure of nothing so much as the feeling of standing on the edge of a canyon and screaming, waiting for an echo that refuses to come.

Another storm hits the town that night, thunder bellowing and lightning skittering across the horizon like the sky itself is cracking open, like all hell is literally breaking loose. Veronica thinks about her parents on an airplane to Riverdale, gazing out the pressurized window at the chalky sky and everything beyond it -- stars and galaxies and dark matter, the entire scattered universe. Scattered, but acceptable. Indefinitely incomplete. She wonders: why can't she be indefinitely incomplete too?

 

* * *

 

Archie shifts, trying to find a comfortable position. It’s Saturday, but his mind is nagging him with reminders of everything he needs to get done.

In addition to the many chores and the pile of schoolwork he's been ignoring, he knows there are things he needs to be doing for Veronica and his friends, things that have been forgotten. But after what happened last night, they need to be dealt with. _Immediately,_ his brain insists.  
  
He can’t even remember the last time he had a conversation with Veronica that didn’t revolve around something dangerous or sad.  
  
He turns over, pulling her against him, his chest to her back, and tries to relax. When they got back from Betty's house after Veronica told them everything, he helped her to bed, and right now she's laying beside him, and for the first time in awhile, things feels normal. Or they would, if he could sleep.

  
Once he decides that isn't going to happen, he starts pulling himself away from Veronica, trying hard not to wake her, but he still does.  
  
“Are you leaving?” she mumbles once he’s sitting up.  
  
“No. Staying right here. Just can’t sleep,” he says quietly, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead. “But I know you're tired, so I'll go out to the living room so you can sleep, okay?"  
  
She wraps her arms loosely around his neck, holding him closer. “Lay with me,” she requests.  
  
“Are you sure?” he asks, though he's already stretching out again because really; if it’s a choice between going out and Veronica, he’ll take Ronnie, thank you very much.  
  
“Don't worry. I'm awake,” she assures him, though she still has the heaviness of sleep in her voice.  
  
They lay back in bed, him on his back, her pressed to his side.  
  
“How do you feel?”  
  
“Good," she murmurs, nosing against his neck. “You?”  
  
“No pain?” he asks, ignoring her question. The bruises on her body have begun to fade, but he knows it still hurts her.  
  
“Not really."  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“You’re avoiding my question,” she says casually.  
  
He sighs heavily. “I’m… I don’t know. Stressed out, I guess.”  
  
“You need to relax,” she says, smirking. She tilts her chin up to fit their lips together, kissing him like she has more in store.  
  
“And you need to heal,” he reminds her. He tries to pull away, but he’s already half hard and he somehow already knows he's not winning this argument.  
  
“I told you I'm not in pain. I'm not breakable, Archie,” she says, trailing the tips of her fingers down his chest. He catches them just before they slip down lower.  
  
“I know you’re not,” he groans. “But what if I hurt you?"  
  
“Mmm, you won't,” she mumbles against his lips before kissing him more insistently. He pulls away, ready to argue with her some more, but she cuts him off. “Archie, please. It's been over a week for me too.”

He finally runs up the white flag at that, and he swoops back down to fit their lips together. He doesn’t know how long he kisses her for, just that it feels like an eternity and the white morning light filters in a little brighter. Her arms curl around his neck, a whimper trapped in her throat and held there by his lips moving against hers. Even when Archie finally pulls away, it's just to trail more kisses down her neck to her collarbones, leaving marks only where they'll be out of sight once she's dressed -- otherwise she'll have his head. He presses her body into the mattress with his own.  
  
She breathes out softly when she spreads her legs to hold him against her, and all he can think is that this feels so good. It's been easy in the recent rush of their lives to forget that they’ve barely had any time alone; not with assassins and car crashes and everything else demanding their attention and energy.  
  
"I've missed you," Archie mumbles against her breast once he's got her shirt off.  
  
He knows from lots of experience that he needs to go slow, to work his way up with her, but really all he wants to do is dive inside her and revel in the feel of his skin reuniting with hers. Still, he knows if he doesn't he'll hurt her, so he kisses his way down her body, pulling her cotton shorts and underwear down before climbing back up, his lips trailing up to the apex of her thighs. Her back arches off the bed with the first swipe of his tongue between her folds and Archie has to hold her down by her hips, her body starting to shake above him.  
  
Veronica tries to push him away when she gets close to coming, always wanting him inside her when she does, but Archie keeps his hold on her hips and persists.  
  
Her breaths are deep and heavy and her eyes are glassy when he finally does pull away, practically ripping his pants off. As soon as he does she reaches out for him, drawing him back down to her body.  
  
She kisses him hard, clutching at his back. When he slowly pushes inside her it's good enough to make his hips shake and surge forward, heedless of the warnings his brain is firing off about being careful.  
  
It only takes a few minutes before he feels her tightening, her head tilting back and her mouth opening in a silent scream as pleasure crashes through her like a wave. Veronica's whole body is shaking and covered in a thin layer of sweat by the time it's done.  
  
"I love you," she says, breathless, still lost in the rush.  
  
"I love you too," Archie grits out, trying to hold off his own climax.

  
Veronica comes back to herself slowly, her hands working their way into his hair, and eventually her lips meet his again.  
  
The movement of their tongues mirror the way he's moving inside her, at first indulgent and explorative, enjoying the reunion, and then more pointed, urging him towards his end, and finally, demandingly, and he comes with a cry barely muffled against her shoulder.  
  
They stay tangled together afterwards, neither one willing to break the connection. But eventually they do, and Veronica wants to go back to sleep. She's barely shut her eyes before her phone is ringing though, _now_ , at the ungodly hour of 8:30 AM. Since she laid awake for hours last night replaying the bombing and the screaming in her head, she isn't amused.

“Hello?” she says.

“Veronica?” It's her father. She knows it's her father because she recognizes his voice, but it's tempered with something she's not used to hearing from him: Defeat. Weariness.

She sits up straight in bed. Beside her, Archie is staring up curiously. “Daddy?” she says, all at once alert. “Did your flight come in?”

“No, mija,” he says. “We had some problems. With the airport,” he adds quickly, in a voice that makes Veronica think his problems in fact had nothing to do with the airport. “We won't be home for a few more days. I just wanted to call and tell you. And to let you know--” here he pauses, then says, “everything is going to be okay. No more bad things will happen while we're gone. I promise. I love you.”

Veronica's heart beats quickly. Archie is looking at his own phone now, though his attention is still clearly on her. “Dad, what happened with the investors?” she starts to ask, but before she can get the question out, he's already hung up, the line disconnecting with a definitive click.

Archie blows out a breath as he sits up next to her. “Jughead wants us to meet him for breakfast at Pop's.”

Clearly, the universe wants them to get back to the life that exists outside of Archie's bedroom door, and they can only comply. But when they meet Jughead, pink cheeked and still ardent, they're on the receiving end of a very sarcastic eye roll and a comment about it being 'good to know they're keeping busy while Veronica is literally on medical absence.’ He could be joking, but his eyes are cold as marbles.

It makes Veronica's stomach twist unpleasantly. She hates the idea of fighting with him, but even more than that, she hates being the cause of Archie fighting with him -- his best friend. “Jughead--”

“No,” he says, barely glancing up from his coffee. His hands are wrapped around the ceramic cup. “I need you not to talk to me for a few minutes. I'm pissed. And I don't usually get pissed at you, Veronica. I don't have a whole lot of experience doing it. So I need both of you to sit here and order your breakfast and not talk to me until I'm finished computing.”

“That's not fair,” Archie protests. He sits down across from Jughead and against her better judgement, Veronica does too. “Veronica didn't force any of this to happen. You can't blame her.”

Jughead looks at him now, rolls his eyes like he's being stupid on purpose. “I wouldn't even be angry about this if Betty hadn't almost died, which -- _whoops_. Ever stop to think these psychopaths could be coming after you next, Archie?”

Veronica has the strangest, sharpest flash of annoyance just then. Already, she's fed up with him. Betty is her best friend, and she doesn't want to hear out loud what she's already been decrying in her head for days: that _she_ nearly killed her. It makes her hate herself a little. It makes her hate Jughead a little, too. “Fine,” she says, cavalier as she can manage. “I'm a shitty girlfriend for endangering Archie, and a shitty friend for what happened to you and Betty.”

“Okay, _listen_ ,” Jughead sighs noisily and pushes his coffee aside, an expression on his face like he didn't want to say this but Archie and Veronica had to go ahead and push him, so here goes. “I know things have been rough for you, Veronica. And it sucks in an Alanis Morissette, isn't-it-ironic kind of way that you came to Riverdale to get away from all the awful parts of your life and this shit is still happening to you, but I feel like you've done a pretty good job at achieving whatever redemption arc you were after, and obviously you don't want any of this stuff to be happening, but that doesn't change the fact that it is.” He ticks off a list on his fingers like potential side effects of some new, unapproved medication. “Betty and I get ran off the road. Your father comes in to question us about it. You get bombed. Your parents skip town, they don't even come back after the bombing. Usually you two would be all over trying to stop these maniacs, but instead it's like you're sitting here waiting for something even worse to happen. And maybe you're scared, and maybe it's out of character or maybe you're the only people you can be yourselves around. Maybe there's more to all this than you're letting on. Maybe it's a conspiracy even to you. I don't know. That's your business and you can deal with this crisis however you want -- as long as other people don't get dragged down while you're figuring it out.”

“My parents are in New York fixing this right now!” Veronica argues, bristling.

Jughead makes a face. “Veronica, don't even kid. Your parents caused this mess, directly or indirectly. And that's not--” he stops short, shakes his head. “I don't want you to think I'm mad at you because of the crash.”

“Then why are you mad at me?” she explodes. She glances around, self conscious -- there are a couple businessman drinking coffee at the bar, an elderly couple or two eating breakfast. She lowers her voice. “Why?”

“I'm mad at you--” he sighs again. “I'm mad at you because it's like this terrifying thing is happening and you both just forgot that you're incredible. _We_ solved Jason Blossom's murder. _We_ found out who the Black Hood was. I'm not even really mad that your father brought all this to Riverdale, even though everyone thinks your family is the Antichrist--”

“Thanks,” Veronica interrupts, and Jughead pushes out a noisy breath.

“I just feel,” he says crisply. “Like you're forgetting yourselves over this.”

Now Archie's the one who's pissed. “What exactly am I forgetting, Jughead? That my best friends were almost killed last week? That my girlfriend was targeted with a bomb? That she's being sent literal death threats from the mafia or whoever the hell is really behind this? And you expect us to team up and try to take them down like they wouldn't put bullets in our heads the second they caught wind of what we were trying to do? Would that help you maintain this image you have in your head where we go after the bad guys and win?”

Veronica wants to calm Archie down, to take them both out of here, step on the gas and figure out what to do after that. She remembers, suddenly, the nights she spent at galas when she was ten and eleven, sitting at a table by herself drinking sparkling water while her parents said their goodbyes to their colleagues. She wants her parents now, is the truth.

When Archie starts to stand, Veronica moves out of his way so he can get out of the booth. She's so sick of everyone else's opinions she could scream, and she thinks he feels the same way. “Thanks, Jughead,” he says, nasty as humanly possible. “I'll be sure to keep that in mind.”

He takes Veronica's hand and pulls her toward the exit.

As they drive, she stares out the window. She thinks of Seattle, of rainy woods and coffee on cloudy mornings. She thinks of the desert and hot, arid air. She thinks of the middle of this country, the endless rolling green of it, and she wants so badly to get out of this place.

But right now, as everything Jughead said seeps in, the only logical conclusion she can draw is that she needs to go to New York.

She needs to fix this.

* * *

 

Archie is showering and Veronica is sitting at his kitchen table, formulating an escape from Riverdale the likes of which would have impressed Houdini. She's weighing the pros and cons of telling Archie about her insane and murky plan when the bell rings once. She makes her way to the living room and flings the door open: there's Betty on the other side, wearing a pale pink sweater and an open, anticipating expression. “Good,” she breathes. “You're still here.”

“Betty.” Veronica blinks once, holding the door open.

Betty walks in and they both go back to the table and sit. Veronica is afraid she might be here to restate everything Jughead said, but the morning light is filtering in and glowing softly on her skin when she says, “I should have told you this last night, but I was--” she pauses. “Processing everything you said, I guess. But Veronica, I'm not mad at you. I would never blame you for what's happening, and I know you must be scared -- I definitely am. You haven't had a whole lot of breaks, so I'm giving you one. Jughead might be mad, but I'm not, and I'm going to talk to him. I'm here for you, V. We're all in this together.”

Right away Veronica feels a lump rise up in her throat. Her hands sit sort of helplessly in her lap. “You always give me breaks,” she manages, voice cracking a little bit -- and she doesn't deserve her, she doesn't, somebody as brave and smart as Betty to help her fight her wars. “You're my best friend.”

Betty smiles a little, eyebrows turning like she's worried Veronica's going to get her started, too. “Oh, stop it,” she says quietly, and then: “You're my best friend, too.”

Well, that does it. Veronica's crying for real when she gets to her feet, everything so painfully close to the surface all the time. “I'm sorry,” she tells Betty, almost too far gone to get the words out. “I never wanted you to get hurt.”

Betty stands too, wrapping her arms around her. “I know,” she tells her, her blonde temple bumping softly against Veronica's. “I'm sorry, too. I should have talked to Jughead before he could get to you and Archie this morning. And I should have told you sooner that I wasn't mad.”

“I thought you were going to hate me forever,” Veronica says, and realizes it's true: she thought for sure their friendship was over, that she'd lost her for good and would never be able to find a way back. She's so hugely relieved that she's here.

Betty smiles. “I could never hate you,” she says. “I love you too much for that.” She sighs a little, squeezes. Waits for Veronica to quiet down. “Shh, V. You're okay.” She says it again a minute later, just quiet: “You're okay,” she promises softly, and there's something in her voice to make Veronica believe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!! I hope you liked this chapter -- please let me know your thoughts, your comments are incredibly motivating! As a quick reminder, you can also find/engage with me on tumblr as vaarchie. :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was probably the most difficult for me to write because the headspace was so heavy. Hope you like it! Also, if you're a fan of Scandal (or the 100), there's an easter egg towards the end!

Once Veronica manages to pull herself together, she sits down again, crossing her arms over the table. The wood feels cold and clean against her skin. Betty sits across from her, patient. She can hear Archie getting out of the shower, the sound of life spinning on, and he joins them in the kitchen in a matter of minutes, toweling off his hair and giving a surprised greeting to Betty.

 

“There was something Jughead said this morning,” Veronica begins, now that they're all together. “About how I'm not doing anything to stop the investors.”

 

“Oh, V, that's not--” Betty begins, but Veronica interrupts.

 

“No, he was right. I mean, if this was anything else, I'd be doing everything I could to put an end to it. But since it's so close to my family,” she pauses, collects her thoughts. Realization dawns like the sun. “It made me scared. And fear is paralyzing.” She looks at Betty earnestly. “But not anymore. I'm done being afraid, and I know what I need to do.”

 

Archie is watching her cautiously. “What's that, Ronnie?”

 

Veronica reaches out and takes his hand. “I'm going to New York. I'm part of Lodge Industries, and I have a right to be involved with the negotiations, which, at this point, are taking so long that it's clear my parents are refusing to sacrifice or make a trade-off. I need to be there to influence them at the very least.” Betty and Archie both look like they're about to protest, but Veronica pushes ahead. “My mind is made up. I'm leaving in an hour, and I'll be back as soon as I can.”

 

“You don't have to do this, V,” Betty says. She doesn't smile. A breeze blows in from the half open window, and a strand of blonde hair flutters free from her ponytail. “Veronica.”

 

Veronica sighs a bit. She knew they wouldn't choose the path of least resistance and just let her go, but she's still frustrated. “Yeah, I do.” 

 

“No, I mean. Not to like, hit you over the head with the fact that you're sixteen or anything, but” -- Betty looks at her pointedly -- “you really don't.”

 

She laughs in spite of herself, a dark, hollow sound. “You think I haven't thought about that?” she asks her, dropping Archie's hand to prop her chin up on one elbow. “It's occurred to me. But it doesn't change anything, and the fact that we're sixteen didn't stop them from coming after us.” She picks at a loose thread on the cuff of her sleeve, watching it unravel. “Anyway, that's not even really it.”

 

“Okay,” Betty tells her. She leans forward over the table, blue eyes sharp and curious. “Then what is it really?”

 

Veronica shrugs a little. Archie is watching her, waiting for the answer, and she's trying to think how to explain it -- how to tell them that in some weird way she's already made the break between her old life and her new one. Like everything that's happened has pushed her over some boundary, some line of demarcation so clearly defined that once she breached it her life would always be divided into when she was a little kid and when she wasn't, neatly bisected into the then and the now. How to tell them that she just sort of feels it in her bones.

 

“Ronnie--”

 

“Archie, I just--”

 

He shakes his head. “I'm coming with you.”

 

Well. She'd expected him to put up a fight, to ask her not to go -- but she hadn't expected that he'd want to come.

 

“Me too,” Betty pipes up. “And Jughead.”

 

“Jughead isn't--”

 

“Jughead isn't going to be mad anymore,” Betty says. “There's no stronger team than the four of us together. He knows that. And like I told you, V, we're all in this together.”

 

Veronica shakes her head and feels like there are loose coins rattling around inside. “It's too dangerous for you three. You won't know these people, not like I do.”

 

Archie slides his hand up her arm. “Well,” he sighs. “Danger has never stopped us before. And anyways, it's obvious that Riverdale is no safer. Plus,” he smiles a little, but it fails to reach his eyes, “I’ve always wanted to see Central Park.”

 

Veronica tries to smile back and misses by roughly the distance between here and the other side of the world. “It’s nice there,” is all she says.

 

* * *

 

 

Betty was right. Jughead comes. The four of them drive for several hours in Hiram's five seater before they pull off to grab provisions and fuel up.

 

Veronica inhales deeply, then exhales. _This is happening,_  she whispers under her breath as she drifts down an aisle.

 

The store smells cheap. It doesn't reek, but it has a sterile stench that's on par with the Riverdale Hospital and makes her want to pinch her nose. She lifts her chin up to look around. The aisle is a crowded affair, filled with strangers, and for the first time in her life she sees an extra layer of meaning in that word. Not that there's anything inherently _strange_ about a man in a business suit drinking wine straight from the bottle, or about a group of elderly women looking at fish oil, or about a person with teardrops tattooed on his face, but when these unique individuals find themselves in close proximity to one another in aisle two of a random roadside convenience store… voilà. Strangers.

 

But who is she to judge? She's the token teen with a half baked plan, so she supposes she's only adding to the strange vibe. She grabs a bottle of water as a middle aged woman pushes past her to get to the Cheerios. She picks up peroxide, gauze, and a tube of Neosporin, bypasses the thirty-racks of Bud Light in the industrial fridge, and hopes no one says anything to her as she wishes she were at home with Hermione. Her mother believes in dinner parties and wine tasting at dusk, events that require invitations and drinks with stirs and a glass jug full of daisies on the table. “ _Veronica, sweetheart_ ,” she would say if she could see the way her daughter is spending her night. " _This is not what we do._ ”

 

She doesn't want to think about her mother in this store. She doesn't want to think about anything, actually, so she plays games to keep herself occupied as she waits in line: Count The Drunk People, or Things She Wishes She Were Doing Right Now. She doesn't want to go back out to the car. She can feel herself receding, going so far that no one can catch her, and she doesn't know how to stop it, just wants to get everyone out of this alive.

 

The cashier surveys her purchases and looks at her half-sympathetically and says, “Hope your day gets better.”

 

“Thanks,” she says, staring at the harsh fluorescent light.

 

Archie is pumping gas when she walks out, looking tired. His shoulders jut a little beneath his t-shirt, fiberglass or shale.

 

Actually, she thinks as she watches him: they look sort of oddly like wings.

 

She's still walking toward the car when he gets back in and turns the engine over, the taillights glowing like two red coals. She slides into the front seat and Archie pulls back onto the road, the convenience store fading in the rearview mirror like waking up from a dream.

 

* * *

 

 

It's early evening when they finally get to New York, the sun drifting toward the western sky behind them as they locate their hotel. It's not sketchy or cheap or even tucked away from the busiest streets -- _hiding in plain sight,_ as Veronica put it. After they get the keys to both their rooms, Archie and Jughead and Betty all look at Veronica.

 

“So,” Jughead says, “we're in New York. What's the next step?” he asks, eyeing the doorman and keeping his voice low.

 

Veronica straightens. She's thought about coming back to New York so many times over the last six months that actually being here feels a little like a dream, too. She traveled back here, with Archie no less, which was something she wanted and wanted and wanted for so long that wanting it was almost a part of her chemical makeup, so badly that even now that they're here she's still on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It would be different, maybe, if the circumstances were something other than what they are. As it is, they're here to investigate, and everyone is still watching her, waiting for an answer.

 

“Now we go to Lodge Industries headquarters,” she says, her tone cool and collected, like she knows what she's doing. She _does_ know what she's doing, she tries to remind herself; the drive up here gave her plenty of time to formulate a plan, and she's smart, quick on her feet. Most importantly, she knows her way around New York and around her father's associates, so really, she has no reason to panic yet.

 

The drive to Lodge Industries’ capital is uneventful, and unfortunately, so is their arrival. They sit on the street outside the shiny, looming building waiting for any sign of anyone Veronica knows -- namely her parents -- but all she sees is unfamiliar people in business suits going in and out of the revolving doors. She wonders what would happen if she walked in right now and started asking questions; _“Hi, I'm the owner's daughter. Just here to see how things are going with the coup."_  It might be worth it just to see the looks on their faces.

 

She grows increasingly frustrated as the minutes go by with nothing to show. What they don't tell you about stakeouts is how long and often fruitless they are, and Veronica is having a hard time accepting that nothing is happening. Once the sky is full dark and Lodge Industries starts shutting off its lights, Archie finally says, “Maybe we should try again tomorrow, Ronnie.”

 

She pushes the heels of her hands into her eyes, colors exploding like fireworks, like something detonating inside her head.

 

* * *

 

 

Betty and Jughead join Archie and Veronica in their room, probably to discuss tomorrow's plan. Archie stands and stares out the window while Veronica digs around in her overnight bag for a bottle of aspirin she knows she threw in there.

 

“So we didn't find anything today,” Betty says, sounding logical. “Not the end of the world. What we need,” she says, “is to relax. So what’s happening tonight? Any plans?”

 

Well, sort of, if overthinking and being on edge counts. “Was thinking I'd jet down to Havana for the weekend, actually,” Veronica tells her, figuring sarcasm is the safe way to go. Archie is still staring out the window. “Check out the nightlife.”

 

“Oh, I see,” Betty flops down onto the bed. “Well, if you think you could maybe blow off El Presidente just for tonight, I think we should all go out. Try to have one night of normalcy before we start hunting and negotiating with assassins tomorrow.”

 

“What, at a club?” Veronica is a little disbelieving. “This, from Betty Cooper?”

 

Betty shrugs, arches an eyebrow. “It's not like we need to get drunk or do drugs,” she says, “but dancing and having a good time? That sounds pretty tempting to me. We _are_ in New York City, after all.”

 

Veronica is remembering so clearly the way she was when she was thirteen, when she was fourteen, when she was fifteen. How _she_ would have been the one to suggest going clubbing and getting _spectacularly_ drunk, thank you very much. Back then, it would have been procedural. For one fleeting second Veronica almost says no, almost says she's too tired from the drive and needs to draw up a plan for when she comes into contact with the investors, but in the end that idea is too bleak to contemplate.

 

“Yeah, we are,” she smiles and wills down the mass of anxiety she already feels forming in the pit of her stomach. “You know, it's sort of a bitch to get to Cuba, anyway, so.”

 

“I mean, customs alone,” Betty grins, sitting up, tightening her ponytail. “We should all get ready.”

 

Jughead speaks then. “You're not serious, are you?” Veronica had almost forgotten he was there, but she looks at him now, his eyebrows knitted together and an expression on his face like Betty’s broken his beating heart. “I mean-- you can't be _serious_.”

 

“I agree with Jughead.” That was Archie, turning away from the window to stand at the end of the bed and shake his head a little. “With everything that's happening, it's--”

 

“Possibly the _worst_ conceivable idea,” Jughead interjects.

 

“--not the smartest move,” Archie finishes.

 

Veronica shrugs a little. Betty gets to her feet to stand beside her. “I'm not going to sit in this hotel room and worry. If you two don't want to come, that's your decision, but I've flown solo at these clubs more times than I can count. Betty and I will be fine.”

 

Archie laughs a little, empty and ingenuine. “Right, and I suppose Jughead and I will just sit in our respective rooms and watch Law and Order all night.” He sighs. “Okay, Ronnie. You win,” he says. “Let's get ready.”

 

“Jug?” Betty asks quietly.

 

Jughead is still scowling. “I'm ready when you are,” he says finally, and that's that.

 

* * *

 

 

New York is shiny like a carnival, all Art Deco buildings and neon storefronts, and the club where they end up looks like the bar at the Ritz compared to the one in Riverdale. They have to walk down a dark, garbage-strewn alley to get through the back door, though, and Archie wonders how Veronica knows where she's going.

 

She holds his hand as she expertly weaves through the crowd, pulling him along like deadweight. It seems to him that she likes crowds, big noisy crushes of people. It seems to him that she's good at them.

 

Back in Riverdale, it was easy to forget that Veronica lived an entire life into which Archie had no point of entry -- that she used to hang out with friends he's never met, party in clubs he's never heard of.

 

She lets go when they get to the bar, peering through the smoke, and leans over it to order shots. She asks Archie what he wants and she has to raise her voice to be heard over the music, something thumping and loud that Archie doesn't recognize.

 

He gets close to ask, “Isn't the bartender going to card you?” in her ear.

 

She shakes her head. “Don't worry. This is the one night we're _not worrying,_  remember?”

 

Archie thinks that might be impossible for him, but figures that she deserves this, some kind of escape, so ultimately he surrenders. “Okay,” he says reluctantly. “I'll have whatever you're having, then.”

 

When he says that, Veronica smiles, _really_ smiles, like the fog burning off in the morning, her golden skin and her sharp, intelligent face lighting up for the first time in what feels like forever, and it makes Archie's heart swoop, a pinball machine on _tilt_.

 

The bartender looks at Veronica and says, “Been awhile since you swung by,” before he slides the shots across the table and takes the stack of cash that she gives him in return.

 

“And it will be awhile before the next time,” Veronica says. She turns back to Archie then, and they start losing themselves in liquor and lips and the beat of the bass pounding through them as they dance, his hands all over her and her body pressed up against his. He has a much easier time forgetting to worry after that.

 

* * *

 

 

Veronica feels like she's been dancing for hours, she and Archie snaking their way through the crowd, the tight knots of people moving around them, glass bottles sweating in their hands. Betty and Jughead have been making out every time she's glanced over at them.

 

She's glad they're having fun. Archie, though, her Archie Andrews, is who's really captivating her. He's wearing a plain white t-shirt, the kind you buy in packs of three for six dollars, but of course he looks amazing, all angles and muscles and his whole body relaxed, like he's finally free. It makes her so happy to watch him, and she's never been gladder to be his girlfriend. She wishes there was a way to capture him, to write him down.

 

He has both hands on her waist from behind and his lips pressed to the back of her neck when she blinks once and sees someone standing against the opposite wall staring at her, his gaze too intense to not be intentional. She sets her hands over Archie's and feels her heart jump into her throat, lights strobing and the music suddenly too loud for her to even hear her own thoughts. Archie's hands run up and down the sides of her body and he guides her around to face him in one swift movement, his lips moving to her jaw, her throat, her shoulders.

 

“Archie,” she gasps out and careens her neck around, but when she looks back at the wall, the man is gone.

 

She feels him hum against her skin and rests her forehead against his shoulder -- her head suddenly feels heavy enough to snap off her neck entirely. She looks up and sees the man again, on the other side of the room now, eyes locked on her in a way that makes her whole body shudder. She blinks, and he disappears. She blinks again, and now he's closer, and again, and he's gone completely, until he's not -- there he is in the corner, there he is by the bar, there he is a few feet away. Veronica feels rigid, stuck in place. She grips onto Archie with all her strength and thinks her knees might give out if he wasn't already holding her up.

 

“Babe,” he says, right next to her ear. “Ronnie.”

 

When she blinks again, the man is inches away from her face, right behind Archie, and she cries out as she tries frantically to jump away, but Archie is holding her and there's nowhere for her to run anyway, and then the man is gone but she's still panicking, trying to twist away or curl up on the ground, like maybe if she's down there no one will be able to see her or touch her or hurt her. It feels like her entire body is liquefying. She can't get over the notion that the floor isn't quite even. Her blood is pounding in her ears.

 

“Ronnie,” Archie is saying, over and over, alarm and confusion. He lifts her up until he's the only thing keeping her from falling. “What's wrong, baby?” he asks, and then that's what he's repeating. _“_ What's wrong?”

 

Her arms are wrapped around his shoulders and her eyes are full of tears as she stares at the man, who's back against the wall now. “Him,” she manages, and when Archie turns to look, his eyebrows only furrow.

 

“Who?”

 

“ _Him,_ ” Veronica says more insistently. “Him. Staring at me.” She can barely hear herself over the music. No one else is paying attention to them.

 

“Ronnie,” Archie says, and he's still holding her so tight. “There's no one there. It's okay. There's no one there.”

 

When Veronica blinks, the man is gone.

 

* * *

 

 

Archie tells Jughead and Betty they're leaving and then gets Veronica out of there as fast as humanly possible, leads her into a cab and then into their hotel room. She stays silent the whole time, her knuckles blanched from curling so tightly into fists, her eyes still glassy from alcohol, despite the entire experience being more than sobering. The blood, she thinks vaguely, is having a hard time getting to where it needs to be.

 

She sits instinctively on the bed and Archie sets the key on the table, rubs hard at his eyes, and turns to look at her. His expression is sad and it makes her feel so much worse, so she looks away, down at her hands, anywhere but into the eyes of the person she loves so desperately and hurts so badly.

 

He sits next to her, reaches over and picks up her hand. His calluses scrape her palm as he pulls her across the bed until she's almost sitting in his lap.

 

“Ronnie,” he says softly. She hasn't stopped trembling.

 

She tries to keep her mind studiously, fastidiously blank. It feels like she's wrapped in a thick swaddle of blankets, everything muffled and coming from some far-off place. She knows somewhere in the darkest corner of her brain that she's about to break; something powerful coming, better board up the glass. As the seconds tick by and Archie looks at her, some insane part of her begins to think that she made the whole thing up. Maybe she imagined they went to a club. Maybe there were never any investors at all -- and the wave of relief she feels in that moment is tidal and huge. Then she remembers it's not true.

 

“Ronnie,” Archie whispers again, and it's enough to completely undo her.

 

She looks at him, finally, eyes pooling, and says, “I'm sorry,” but she nearly chokes on the words and then starts sobbing, like all of the terror and emotion she's been locking down deep inside has finally boiled over with those two words, and she _can't stop._

 

“No, Ronnie,” he says, and pulls her right into his lap. His hands are framing her face, pushing her hair back, wiping away her tears. “Don't apologize.”

 

“There's something wrong with me,” she tells him, gasping in shallow breaths that are few and far between as she tries to stop crying. “Archie,” she says, “I'm broken. I'm not--” she starts shaking her head rapidly. She feels like her entire existence has been one big mistake. “This must be-- is this my punishment for being a bad person? Am I just filled with some kind of sickness or darkness?” She's shaking harder now, losing control. “I deserve it, maybe,” she tries to reason, and watches as Archie starts shaking his head, “I must deserve it. I do deserve it. But it _hurts._ _So bad_.” It hurts worse to say it loud, actually, and she loses her ability to speak as the sobs come harder, wracking through her, and she thinks surely the human body was not designed to withstand this much pain. She finds a strange sort of comfort in the idea that maybe soon she'll shut down completely. She finds a strange sort of comfort in the idea that she's finally hit rock bottom, that after this she couldn't possibly feel any worse.

 

She feels like her lungs are collapsing, feels lonely and homesick and embarrassed by everything she's incapable of doing. She wants to hit rewind on this night and on this month, for this bizarre alternate universe to bend over on itself again and for everything to go back to the way it was before.

 

Archie hushes her softly. “Breathe, Ronnie,” he whispers. He strokes her hair as she cries into his shirt, and he speaks softly, trying to calm her. “There's nothing wrong with you. Did you hear that?” He swallows. He can't stand seeing her in this much pain. “There's _nothing_ wrong with you. You're going through something traumatic, and of course you're going to break down because of it.” He laughs a little, quiet and a bit choked, and kisses her shoulder. “I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner,” he murmurs against her skin. “But that's just who you are, isn't it? Always holding everything together. Always putting on a brave face.” His voice is slow and the hand that isn't stroking through her hair is running up and down her back, smooth and steady. “But you don't have to be so strong all the time, Ronnie. If forgiveness is what you want, I'll give that to you, okay?” he says. “You're forgiven. But I don't ever want you to apologize to me for being human.” He kisses her shoulder again, trails his lips to her collarbone, her neck, her jaw, her cheeks, leans back so he can look at her face. His thumbs brush away her rapidly falling tears, but she's stopped sobbing, and she's trying to take substantial breaths. “And you're _not_ a bad person. You're the best person, you're my favorite person, and you _don't_ deserve what's happening to you. You _never_ deserve to be in pain, and it's _never_ your fault. I know it hurts, and if I could take it away, Ronnie, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

 

Her hands are balled into fists again, and he pries them open, rubs her flattened palms to get the blood flowing back into them, kisses her knuckles and lets her rest her head on his shoulder again. He holds her like that for a long time, rubbing her back and massaging the tension out of her until she's still and quiet. He knows she must be exhausted. “I love you,” he whispers finally, like a promise, and he knows -- he just knows, without a doubt -- that he'll do whatever it takes to keep her safe.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Sorry this chapter took me so long to post! I can't even begin to explain how busy I've been, but I do apologize for the wait. This chapter is shorter than what I usually write and I didn't have time to include everything I wanted to, but it is going to be important to the plot. Hope you like it and I'll update again ASAP!

The following evening is damp and Veronica is in a hurry -- there still hasn't been anything to tip them off as to what's going on inside Lodge Industries, and she hasn't yet worked up the guts to walk straight in and ask them. So instead, she says she's going to investigate known associates of her parents, and she's starting with none other than Nick Saint Clair.

 

“Are you insane?” Archie asks her at the same moment Jughead says, “That's crazy,” and Betty says, “No way, V.”

 

But Veronica insists, and as is typical, she doesn't let anything -- not even the three of them -- stand in her way. And that's how they find themselves getting ready for the soiree Veronica is “pretty sure” Nick will be at.

 

The party is only a few streets away from the hotel -- a crowded function in a penthouse soaring high above the traffic and honking horns, the lights of New York City like some far off dream down below. It's exactly the kind of party Veronica and Nick used to occupy, shot glasses and shattered wine bottles. Sometimes she'd be the one to get the hook up and whirl into the scene with him at her side, like she had a perpetual spotlight on her wherever she went and he was just there to make it brighter. Sometimes he'd get invited to the parties first and then he'd be leading her in by the hand, introducing her to one of his endless acquaintances before he drifted away, promising he'd be right back, always, that he just had to talk to this guy really quick, take care of this one thing.

 

“Unless you want to…,” he always began, then trailed off, leaving her to fill in the blanks on her own: unless she wanted to ditch the party and go back to his place, unless she wanted to drive away and get wasted with him in Queens, unless she wanted to be finally, finally, the first one to suggest they take their relationship a step further.

 

She didn't want to, was the problem, and so she danced in any number of expensive New York City apartments, swallowing down burning liquor and the coarse bite of salt and not seeing the minutes passing by as she and everyone around her descended into delirium.

 

Nick always wandered back eventually, blissed out and mellow. He was always glad to see her, though her moods were a little more unpredictable: sometimes she was so happy he was there that she was super friendly, and other times she was tired and annoyed. One time someone stole her credit card and he was sleepy-eyed and flushed when he ambled in from the kitchen, and Veronica? Veronica was ready to kill him for taking her to a party with thieves and degenerates until she realized it hadn't been stolen at all, it was just buried at the bottom of her bag. Even when the sun dawned too soon on her pounding head and upset stomach, she never once regretted it and was always ready to do it all over again.

 

Tonight, when Veronica walks in with Archie, Betty, and Jughead, she's immediately hit with that all too familiar scent of alcoholic incessance, and for a moment she's transported back to the time she drunkenly proclaimed she was abandoning vodka forever before she promptly took another shot in the middle of July. She thinks about how easy it would be to slip right back into her old life, the crush of dancing bodies and the loud laughter calling out for her to join them, saying _you're finally home, this is where you belong._ Even still, as she makes her way into the kitchen, she feels less like a puzzle piece clicking quietly into place and more like she's exactly where she doesn't want to be.

 

She makes her way over to the sink to survey the room, but there's no sign of Nick -- she kicks at one of the cabinets a little, already impatient and itching to get out of this place. She, by mistake, puts her hand in something sticky on the counter and is rubbing her palm on her skirt when someone familiar comes crashing toward her like a tidal wave, grinning widely.

 

“Hey, Veronica!” she says too loudly. It sounds like a slap, almost makes Veronica flinch, but instead she straightens as the very blonde girl hands her a red plastic cup.

 

“Lauren,” Veronica says crisply, giving her a tight smile. She holds up the cup. “Thought you didn't like beer.”

 

The other girl smiles back, tart and sickly, nothing organic there at all. “Which is why I handed it to you.”

 

Veronica used to see Lauren pretty often, at a lot of the same parties she and Nick would frequent, and for the most part the two girls merely tolerated each other, each one averse to the other on account of the mindsets and desires that had been ingrained in them to want to be prettier, richer, better, instead of just wanting to be friends. It was probably the most significant change for Veronica when she moved to Riverdale -- to leave behind that vicious world where everything was the emptiest kind of rat race that left her tired and unfulfilled to fall into fast friendships, the real kind, with people who genuinely wanted to see her do well. She stopped feeling exhausted, and started experiencing real connection.

 

She looks at Betty now, thinks that her efforts to change at least granted her with the highest honor of friendship, the best of the best. Her life is better when Betty is succeeding and is truly happy, and she knows that's a two way street. They've both seen the junk drawers of each other's lives, the stuff that isn't pretty or funny or good, and they're still at each other's sides; not that Veronica wants to be the kind of person who needs to hear weaknesses about another woman in order to accept her, but with Betty, the ability to be vulnerable has only made their friendship stronger.

 

Lauren, though? She would love to tear apart Veronica's weaknesses, to prey on them, and she'll be damned if she's letting that happen.

 

Veronica sets the cup on the counter. “Thanks for that heartfelt generosity,” she says, “but I'll pass.”

 

“Good girl, good girl. Can I ask you a question?” Lauren nudges Archie out of the way like he's not even there so she can stand next to Veronica, bumps her shoulder like they're old friends. “Is it true that your family went like, crazy religious after your dad was arrested? Is that why you don't come to parties around here anymore?”

 

“I don't know that I'd call them crazy religious--” she begins, hardly surprised that Lauren hadn't noticed she moved away.

 

“That's cool, if they are. I didn't mean to pry. I just always feel like Catholicism is one of those religions that makes girls either really frigid or really fun, you know?” Lauren laughed. “Anyway, I just left your boyfriend in the other room. He is _fuuuucked_ up.” She taps her nose and sniffs daintily. “Good luck getting him home tonight.”

 

Veronica straightens. “Who?”

 

Lauren quirks an eyebrow. “Nick, of course. Or are you two _still_ stuck on that whole _will they won't they_ narrative?”

 

Veronica closes her eyes. She was right. He's here. And doing drugs, apparently, though he probably couldn't get his hands on anything _too_ hard. Pills are what typically make an appearance at these parties. _OxyContin produces a high similar to heroin when crushed and snorted,_ thanks for the tip, Wikipedia. She always used to research every gutter drug that she saw people taking, and she usually declined to partake.

 

Lauren's phone rings and she fishes it out of her back pocket, nearly dropping it twice. “Ooh, I gotta get this,” she says cheerfully, heading for the door, weaving a little.

 

And Nick St Clair wanders in as she leaves.

 

When he sees them, he raises his eyebrows and almost smiles. He's clearly drunk, probably high too, but not so far gone that the hard metallic glint is gone from his eyes. “Ronnie,” he says like he's not even surprised to see her. “Dylan saw you in here chatting with Lauren. Speaking of, there goes your friend.”

 

Veronica is cold when she answers. “Right. You know, we actually had a really nice heart-to-heart. I told her about Riverdale, and she told me about how you rape girls and steal your parents’ credit cards for drug money.”

 

“Ouch,” Nick replies, glances at Archie and says, “Don't you ever give her a reason to not be so wound up?” He looks back at Veronica. “Those are some serious allegations from such a pristine individual. You used to be friends with Lauren, _and_ me. I'm not a bad guy, and she's not a crack whore.”

 

“I know. You're Jesus and she's the Virgin Mary.”

 

Nick rolls his eyes a little. “What are you doing back in New York, Veronica?” He side eyes Archie. “With your entourage from out in the boondocks, no less.”

 

“I'm here to chat with you, Nick,” she says, trying to be calm, but just the sight of him makes her want to scream.

 

“Ya know,” he smiles, picks up the plastic cup of beer Veronica left on the counter, chugs it down. “Once upon a time, I would have hoped _chatting_ would be a metaphor for something else.”

 

…

 

The room that Nick leads them into is dim, and someone hits the switch to flood it with light before anyone can start talking. Betty closes the door. Nick sits on the edge of the bed. Archie and Veronica cross their arms. Jughead glares.

 

Nick gives them his notorious smug, entitled smile. “Start chatting, Ronnie.”

 

“What have you and your parents been up to, Nick?” She asks, dropping her arms. Already she's feeling impatient. She's still angry at him for what happened when he came to Riverdale, absolutely, but that's not the whole story, not by a long shot. She knew the second she saw him that being near him was going to unearth all kinds of nastiness in her, Archie, Betty, and Jughead, and just standing near him she's hit with that familiar sear of frustration and shame.

 

“What are you talking about, Veronica?” Nick narrows his eyes at her, then at Archie. “What do you even want?”

 

Veronica leans toward him, eyes cold like stone. “Are your parents involved with what's happening at Lodge Industries?” She watches him closely in the moment after she asks that question, and she knows right away that he has no idea what she means. She straightens. Nick stands up, too.

 

“You have a lot of nerve, Veronica,” he spits out. “You think after the crimes your parents committed, mine would still want to be involved in Lodge Industries? After they sent your rabid boyfriend after me, you think they would still partner together? And considering the two of you are so involved in their business dealings, I don't know why you're asking me. You're a carbon copy of your father, and now I guess that farm boy is too." It's evident that the anger Nick reserves for Archie is damn near bottomless, and Veronica's not surprised that she's going to catch the overflow, especially since she doubts he wants to turn it on Archie and risk a repeat of their last interaction while he's under the influence.

 

Veronica's eyes narrow. “We're leaving now.”

 

Nick composes himself and smirks again, easy as that. “Stay for the party. You know this is still your scene, Ronnie.”

 

“No,” she says immediately; like a reflex, like looking up at the sound of her own name.

 

Nick gives her a look like that's not all the convincing he's going to do, like he's gearing up to persuade her when her phone rings.

 

“Who is it?” Archie asks her.

 

She frowns a little. Her heart rate kicks up a few notches. “My dad,” she says finally, and leaves the room to take the call.


	9. Chapter 9

“Veronica?”

 

Veronica's heart pounds a little as she turns down the hallway, away from the noise of the party. “Hey, dad,” she says, tempering her voice and trying to sound casual.

 

“How is everything back in Riverdale?” he asks calmly.

 

“Good,” she says, one thumb ringing around the edge of a door knob.

 

“Good,” he repeats. Then, just before she's about to say something else, “Ronnie.”

 

She swallows. She feels like he can see right through her skin, wherever he is. “Yup?”

 

She expects him to call her out on her jaunt to New York right away. It was only a matter of time before he found out, and this is clearly the moment where he's going to call her out and probably put her under lock and key for the rest of her life. But instead he just says, “I love you.”

 

“I love you too,” she replies, and then he says goodbye and goodnight and tells her to be safe and that he and her mother will be home as soon as possible -- she says okay, and as she hangs up, she's almost sure she hears him sigh.

 

She puts her phone back into her pocket and suddenly she feels itchy, like she just wants to get out of this apartment. Nick isn't offering her anything useful and she's sick of being here. She's holding onto the door knob of the room she left her friends and Nick in, clutching at it with her fingertips when it swings open and Archie is there.

 

“What did your dad say?” he asks.

 

“Nothing,” she mutters, and pulls him out of the room. Betty and Jughead follow behind him. “We're leaving.”

 

“Thank God,” Jughead says, and as Veronica turns to make her way back toward the front door, she sees Nick staring at her, watching her go.

 

* * *

 

 

This is a bad idea, is what it is. This is a truly terrible idea. There is no logical reason in the world for Veronica to want to do this as badly as she does.

 

She's wandering around the hotel room the next morning while Archie sleeps, restless. She drinks some water standing next to the sink. She walks over to the window and stares at her father's number in her phone's contact list -- dials six numbers, then hedges and hangs up. She paces.

 

Finally she wakes up Archie.

 

“Can you do me a favor?” she says, hovering at the edge of the bed like a ghost and willing herself not to sound so timid.

 

He looks at her expectantly. It's not often that she asks. “What do you need, babe?” Archie answers, and the endearment makes her feel worse.

 

“Can you stay here with Betty and Jughead?” she asks him. “I've got something I need to do.”

 

* * *

 

 

Convincing Archie to let her leave the hotel alone was a challenge, but she managed to get him to comply by promising she would keep him updated and be back within an hour. Now, though, she almost wishes she had brought him along.

 

Lodge Industries somehow manages to look bigger and more threatening than it ever has before as Veronica pulls up to the curb alone. It's only ten in the morning but the humidity is already bearing down when she gets out of the rented car, and the weight of the air feels like something she'd like to throw off. It rained a half hour ago and the sidewalk is slick under her heels.

 

Her heart is pounding when she gets to the tinted glass doors, but before she can even consider turning around and getting back in the car, she forces herself to push them open and step inside the building.

 

Inside, the lobby is quiet save for the low hum of music somewhere over head, and the sound of footsteps as people weave around each other to get where they need to go. It looks, for the most part, like a completely mundane place where normal transactions occur and where lives aren't being threatened at every stop and turn.

 

Facades.

 

Veronica takes a few steps further into the lobby, and the atmosphere seems to shift as people start noticing her. Some of them stare as they pass her by; some of them actually stop dead in their tracks. The people sitting at the counter stop typing on their computers. She watches a man miss his elevator.

 

None of them look happy to see her.

 

For one insane moment she imagines herself in some kind of action movie where she has to single handedly take down every entry level bad guy on the bottom floor before she can move onto the next one, the bigger threats. She focuses on the sound of her heels clacking against the cold floor and tells herself that she's not a lamb walking into a lion's den, no matter how much she feels that way.

 

“Hi,” she plasters a smile on her face and sets her hands on top of the counter. “I'm Veronica Lodge.”

 

The woman behind the counter grimaces. “So you are. Can I help you with something?”

 

“I'm here to talk to whoever's in charge.”

 

The woman shrugs. “Last time I checked, that's  _ your _ last name on the building outside. If you want to talk to the boss, I suggest you call him yourself. He's probably listed in your contacts under the name 'Dad.’”

 

God, that makes Veronica mad, but she keeps her cool. “My father isn't involved in the day to day running of this location,” she says calmly. “I'm here to speak to whomever is in charge  _ here _ .”

 

The other lady opens her mouth like she's ready to say something snappy when the elevators slide open with a ding to reveal a severe looking woman in a pantsuit who looks like she would fit right into Veronica's action movie narrative as the evil villain.

 

“I believe Ms. Lodge is here to speak with me,” she says, and her voice is freezing cold and flat. “Let’s go, Veronica.” She turns on her heel and gets back into the elevator, and Veronica has no choice but to straighten her back and follow.

 

* * *

 

 

When the elevator opens again on a higher floor, the woman immediately steps out and starts walking, not checking a single time to see if Veronica is following, which of course, she is. She finally stops in front of a frosty glass door, and Veronica can see sunlight glowing behind it as the woman turns to face her.

 

“My name is Irena Mills,” she says without a trace of emotion other than slight annoyance. “I used to work for your father.” She pivots again to turn the door knob.

 

“And now what?” Veronica asks cautiously. “You don't work for him anymore?”

 

“No,” Irena says, and pushes the door open. Inside, there are at least ten other people standing around a large wooden desk. Floor to ceiling windows revealing all the towers in New York serve as their backdrop, and they all stand so still and silent that you could hear a pin drop from all the way down on the street below. “He works for us.”

 

Veronica stills, taking in all the faces. There are some that she doesn't recognize at all, and there are others that she does, she just can't put names to them. People she grew up seeing. People who would hug her on her birthday and talk to her parents in the corners of parties, who would clink champagne glasses together to toast with her family. People who blended so seamlessly into the supposed safety of her life that she never would have suspected them to be anything other than who they claimed to be -- people who loved her and her parents. But what makes her heart simultaneously jump and sink more than anything else is the two people at the end of the row, staring at her, cold and unforgiving.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Saint Clair.

 

She'd known it, hadn't she? Nick certainly hadn't had a clue, but Veronica knew it all along. Is this because of what her father did to Nick? Is it because they think he sent Archie after him? Because they pushed them out of the SoDale project? Is that why they're involving themselves in making her life a living hell?

 

Irena walks around to the other side of the desk which somehow makes Veronica feel even more alone -- not that having her on this side really gave her any sort of comfort, but the dichotomy of  _ her vs them _ is much more apparent when she's facing all of them at once with no one beside her.

 

“We were wondering how long it would take you to come find us,” one of the men says nonchalantly. He picks up a bottle of Scotch.

 

“Yes,” agrees Irena. “When we found out you were planning to come to New York in the first place, we thought for certain you'd come straight into the office to talk to us,” she shrugs, unbothered. “Instead you sat outside the building all day, afraid, which I suppose means we've done our job well.” She takes a big sip from the glass of alcohol the man hands her, her lipstick staining the rim of the cup.

 

Veronica keeps her breath steady. “How did you know I was planning to come to New York?”

 

“We know everything you do, Veronica,” says Mr. Saint Clair, and finally she looks at him and his wife head on.

 

“And you're expendable as far as we're concerned,” Mrs. Saint Clair adds, her air casual, flippant, frank. She could be reciting facts from a textbook but her voice is sharp like glass. All at once Veronica is surprised by how it hurts her feelings.

 

She knows the Saint Clairs’ home almost as well as she knows her own: she's sat through a dozen Super Bowls on the leather couch in the den there, eaten king cake on the sun porch every Fat Tuesday for years and years. She knows where they keep the spoons and recycling and extra toilet paper, all the secrets and all the smells. And now they're standing in front of her admitting without a hint of shame that they would murder her in a heartbeat.

 

Clearly none of these people are happy that she's in New York. Still, she suspects if her father finds out that he’ll probably be more upset than anyone else: Veronica is, after all, the one living soul he almost never has a critical word for. Even if he'd never admit it to anyone, she can only imagine how much her apparent commitment to complete and total self immolation gets under his skin.

 

“So,” she says, affecting a carefully honed poker face and staring at Irena and the other associates instead of the Saint Clairs. “What’s your endgame here?”

 

Irena smiles like a cobra, sets down her glass. “We want to destroy the Lodge name and leave you father penniless and broken,” she says easily. “No negotiations. We want him miserable or dead -- after all, that's all he ever intended for any of us. We've simply taken the power from the dictator.”

 

Veronica makes a face. “And people say teenagers are dramatic.”

 

“It's almost amusing, how you pretend not to be afraid of us,” Irena laughs. “Remember when your friends got into that tragic motorcycle accident? Do you recall where you were?” She smiles. “I do. You were laughing. Kissing your boyfriend in front of a diner, because  _ we _ allowed you to. Every single step you take is with our blessing, Veronica. And at any given moment in time, we can take it all away.”

 

For a second Veronica thinks about that night in the parking lot, the taste of chocolate ice cream and the feeling of Archie's fingers on her neck. Had the investors been watching them the entire time? She feels chills go over her arms and feels vaguely thankful that she's wearing a long sleeved coat to hide her skin. She feels intruded upon, has felt that way ever since the stormy night her parents showed her the wooden chest with the knife and the pictures and the dolls.

 

“I see.” Veronica knows her voice isn't as confident as it was before, but she presses ahead. “And how do you plan to do all that?”

 

“Your father will give up Lodge Industries and all of his possessions. He'll never be allowed to return to New York, and we'll watch him and the rest of your family for the rest of your lives to be sure he never attempts to reacquire wealth or hatch some scheme for revenge -- if he does, we intend to squander it immediately.”

 

“Squander it,” she repeats. She nods. “I assume my father hasn't yet agreed to those terms.”

 

“Not yet,” Irena confirms.

 

“Naturally,” Veronica shrugs, and the other woman nods.

 

“He has a lot of pride, but as we apply more and more pressure, and hurt you and your friends more and more,” Irena chuckles, “eventually he'll have to crack.”

 

“And if me or my friends end up dead in the process even though we're innocent?”

 

“You're all merely pawns,” one of the men says matter of factly, stirring his drink. “If you die, that will have no effect on the choices we make.” He looks up at her. “In other words,  _ we don't care. _ ”

 

Mrs. Saint Clair chimes in, “Your death will actually mean Hiram's final breakdown, so whether you live or die, our ends will be achieved.”

 

“Got it,” Veronica says, voice flat and emotionless. If these people are trying to get a rise out of her, she's not going to give them that satisfaction. “Thanks for not sugarcoating it. Where are my parents now?”

 

“They're meeting with us in just a few minutes, so if you don't want to get caught, little one, I suggest you get going. We'll have security escort you out.”

 

Right on cue, three armed guards enter the room and approach her, pulling her out of the office.

 

“And Veronica,” Irena calls. “Reporting this to the police would only mean a swifter downfall for your family, as all their crimes will be exposed at once. Think carefully about your next move,” she yells, and then the door slams shut.

 

* * *

 

 

All Veronica really wants to do is head back to the hotel and give up for the day, but she's not exactly in the mood to admit defeat, so instead she calls Archie to meet her outside.

 

“Where are we going?” he asks when he slides into the front seat, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. He looks so relieved to see her it almost breaks her heart.

 

“I don't know,” she admits. “Just kind of feel like driving.”

 

“You want a milkshake or something? I saw a Baskin Robbins on our way in.”

 

Veronica shakes her head. “No. A soda though, maybe.”

 

He nods and she switches lanes and executes a particularly skilled parallel park outside a Chinese grocery store. She hops out onto the asphalt, the sun warm and reassuring on her skin now that Archie is here.

 

“Oh!” she says happily, once they're inside. This place is just a glorified convenience store, but there's always some kind of unusual produce stacked on the stand near the door -- she'd read a column about it in her old school paper, actually, and something called an Ugli fruit. “They have pomegranates.”

 

“Pomegranates?” Archie tosses a pack of gum on the counter and begins rooting around in his back pocket for his wallet. “You want one?”

 

She pauses, retrieves a bottle of Coke from the refrigerator case near the door. “Yes, actually.”

 

Archie laughs. “So get one. Get me one, too, actually. I've never had one before.”

 

“You've never had a pomegranate?” she asks, setting the pair of softball sized fruits on the counter.

 

“Nope.”

 

“And you've been alive this long?”

 

“Longer than you, even.”

 

“That makes me feel sad for you.”

 

“Cue the violins,” he agrees. He drops his change into the “leave a penny” basket and hands her the plastic bag. 

 

She gives him the keys and asks him to drive, says she wants to eat her pomegranate. Once they're back in the car she fumbles around in the bag until she produces it. She takes a deep breath and cracks it open with her thumbnails. “I met the investors,” she says.

 

Archie hadn't been expecting that from her, that's for sure. She hadn't been expecting it either -- normally she tries to hide this stuff from him for as long as possible -- but it feels like she had to say it. She looks up and watches six different emotions play over Archie's face: surprise, sorrow, something that looks a lot like fear. Finally he settles on concern. “Do you know them?”

 

“Almost all of them,” she confirms. “The Saint Clairs.”

 

He shakes his head, puts the car into drive. “You were right.” She nods. “Did they say what it would take to make them stop?”

 

Veronica shakes her head, decisive. “It's not important. Talking about it doesn't change anything because there's nothing we can do.” A beat later though, as if maybe she'd reconsidered: “They want my family miserable or dead. Either option works for them.”

 

She feels calm when she says that, like she's finally just accepted her fate and it feels almost freeing to not have to be afraid anymore.

 

Archie pulls over suddenly, the car grinding to an abrupt stop on the side of the road. They're only a block away from the hotel.

 

“What are you doing?” Veronica asks, a little shrill.

 

He laughs and shrugs and just like that everything is normal again. “I'm going to eat my damn pomegranate.”

 

“You're out of your mind,” she says, but digs into the bag and hands it over.

 

“Possibly. How do I eat this?”

 

“Just bust it open and eat the seeds.”

 

She watches carefully as he does it, is relieved when he smiles a moment later. “Tastes like fruit punch.” He eats thoughtfully for another moment, then: “How come you didn't have a boyfriend when you lived here?”

 

She almost chokes. “ _ What _ ?”

 

He raises his eyebrows. There's a day's worth of stubble on his chin and pomegranate juice on his bottom lip. “Unless you were lying to me that night at Cheryl's party.”

 

“I wasn't,” she says. She picks a bit at the skin of the pomegranate, digging at it with her nail. “But give me a little credit. Theoretically I could have had one.”

 

“Theoretically you definitely could have,” he agrees. “But why didn't you?”

 

“Because I'm cold and unfriendly.”

 

Archie laughs, slings one arm behind the headrest of the passenger seat. Out the window, cars whiz by, hundreds of strangers going about their business, totally oblivious to whatever might be happening inside the car. “No you're not.”

 

“Oh, I am,” she says. “Ask anybody. An ice queen, even.”

 

“No you're not.” He's serious now. “You just know what you want. It's intriguing.”

 

“Right,” she manages, shaking her head.

 

“Why can't you take a compliment?”

 

“Why are you asking so many questions?”

 

“Why do I still make you blush so much?”

 

“You don't!” She puts her hands to her cheeks. Sure enough, they're burning hot beneath her palms. Still, she shifts her body toward him in the passenger seat, pulls one knee up to rest her chin on.

 

“Ice queens don't blush,” Archie says matter of factly, like he's pleased with himself. “Ergo: You're not an ice queen.”

 

She rolls her eyes. “How scientific.”

 

Archie shrugs. “It's just logic. So who did you like when you lived here?”

 

“Who did I like?” she laughs, knowing he enjoys hearing about her life in New York. “What are we, in sixth grade?”

 

“Humor me.”

 

“I didn't like anybody.”

 

“Nobody?”

 

“Nope. Ice queen.”

 

“Stop saying that,” he says. Then, with a smile: “You liked me, though.”

 

She laughs for a second time. “That's true.”

 

“You’re blushing again,” he says cheerily, extracting a few more seeds from the pale rind of the pomegranate. Out the window, the sun shimmers white. He puts one sticky hand on her cheek and tilts her face forward, and when he kisses her it's sugar sweet and magenta, like something she'd needed in New York all her life but never had.

 

“Ice queen,” he mutters when he pulls back an inch, like he'd set out to prove his point and had been successful. “I don't buy it, Ronnie. Not for a second.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive me for how long this update took! I hope this answered some of your questions about the investors and hope you enjoyed it! Next chapter is coming much sooner, I promise!


	10. Chapter 10

When Veronica suggests going to Central Park at a time like this, it’s a terrible idea any way Archie looks at it. Being in New York in the first place was a pretty terrible idea, but venturing out to one of the most popular places in the city where anyone could be watching his girlfriend or putting a hit on her is stupid, irresponsible, and borderline suicidal. But they're going anyway.

 

Blame every movie hero he idolizes. Blame Hiram. Blame whomever and whatever you want. This is poor decision making at its finest. But they're still going.

 

He tries to keep calm as they weave through the sidewalks, but the problem is that these days, “calm” and “Archie and Veronica” go together about as well as sharp knives and dull minds. He used to think he was pretty laid back and relatively drab -- like, three day weekend coming up? Sit at home watching movies on the couch with his Dad. Score in the forty-ninth percentile on the ACT three times running? Exercise until his muscles are sore. Be best known for having red hair? Excel in football to give people something else to comment on.

 

Calmness only ever got him a stupid, boring life. Veronica is the opposite. Just by being herself, she has a dangerous, terrifying life. He likes to think maybe he can be a safer place for her to land, but walking down the streets of New York feels like the opposite of playing it safe right now. Still, he keeps a steady pace beside her, forcing himself not to look at everyone suspiciously, his heart quickening when the entrance to Central Park appears up ahead.

 

“So,” Archie says, making a play for normalcy if not calmness, “when was Central Park founded?”

 

Veronica laughs once. “About the time Pangea split to form the continents.” As they enter the park, it feels like a relief to Archie to see so much green after having views of nothing but building after building after building for days. “There’s nothing like Central Park,” Veronica says, looking around like maybe she's a little entranced to be back here after so long. Like maybe she's home. “It’s buzzing with energy and it's one of the few places in the city where everyone seems to get along.”

 

Archie can tell. There are people jogging by with dogs, people playing frisbee, people playing violins and tubas. Veronica links her arm with his and he wishes they could keep walking forever in this oasis of nature and peace right in the middle of the loudest city in the world.

 

She leads him to a quieter area; a few rows of trees and they almost can't hear the noise of the city anymore. They spread a blanket and sit, her head in his lap, and she sets her phone down. She stares at the leaves and the sky, and he closes his eyes against the cool wind in a moment of perfect tranquility.

 

It lasts for a few minutes, at least. Then Veronica suddenly sits up, and Archie sees confusion on her face. “What's wrong?” He asks, but she shushes him and picks up her phone. Instead of opening it or touching the screen, she just holds it up to her ear.

 

After a few seconds her eyes go wide. “Did you hear that?!” she hisses.

 

Archie shakes his head. She presses her phone to his ear. It takes a minute, but then he does hear it: a click. Veronica points frantically and silently and Archie nods. “I heard it. What does it mean?”

 

“It's…” Veronica stammers. She shoves a hand into her open bag and produces a notepad. She scribbles out the words, _they tapped my phone._ Then, _let me see yours._

 

Archie's heart beats a little harder. He hands his phone to Veronica and she waits, listening, legs pulled up to her chest. They both hear it click, and Veronica drops it onto the blanket and stands.

 

Archie follows her as she practically sprints away from the blanket and towards the trees, and he almost crashes into her when she comes to an abrupt halt and turns.

 

“They told me they knew what I was doing at all times,” she says. “The investors. I should have _known_ they'd tap our phones.” She crosses her arms and starts pacing, a lioness or lynx. “I think maybe they tapped the cars too. My family's and yours. There could be-- God.” She cuts off, rubbing hard at her eyes. “There could be cameras in my house.”

 

“Then isn't it better that we're here in New York?” Archie tries. “In a hotel?”

 

She shakes her head. “There have been plenty of times where we've all been out of the hotel since we got here. Plenty of opportunities for them to sneak in and plant bugs.” She stops pacing and looks at him. “We need to go back to Riverdale.”

 

“Are you sure, Ronnie? What if--”

 

“ _Your_ house could be bugged, Archie. Your car. Betty's and Jughead's phones are probably tapped. We need to figure this out at home, and there's nothing left for us to do here anyway. I got the answers I wanted. I'm sorry for dragging you here, but we can leave now.” She starts back in the direction of their blanket and phones. “Only talk about normal stuff when we're near our phones, but also, we can't throw them out or they'll know we know about the tapping.”

 

Archie nods and follows her.

 

...

 

The two of them put forth their best effort to sound as normal as possible on their walk back to the hotel and up to Betty and Jughead's room. Once they're inside, Veronica tells them about her meeting with the investors and Archie looks at her like she's crazy.

 

She writes on her notepad, _It’d be weird_ _not_ _to_ _talk about it._ Then she pens out a message for Betty and Jughead to let them know about the tapping, that their phones might be wired too, and that she's concerned the car they drove up here in might be bugged but that they need to leave as soon as possible.

 

“I'm gonna head downstairs for some food,” Jughead says nonchalantly. “I'll be back soon.” He fishes his phone out of his pocket and disappears from the room.

 

Archie sits still, Betty paces, and Veronica plucks at loose threads on the bed as Jughead's absence turns into ten minutes, then ten more. If he doesn't return soon, Veronica will be well on her way to unraveling the comforter. When he finally strides back in his face is flushed and he ad-libs for them to leave their phones and follow him.

 

They go down to the end of the hall and Jughead quietly says, “Veronica was right. I found a GPS tracker attached under the car and a bug under the driver's seat. I looked everywhere, I don't think I missed any. But the question is, what do we do about them? Take them out and risk those sadists knowing about it, or keep them in and let them track us and listen in on us?”

 

So the investors weren't kidding. They'd really been tracking her like prey before the kill. It makes icy fear lodge itself deep in Veronica's gut, and she shakes her head. “I want them out. We'll leave the tracker here so they think we're still at the hotel for as long as possible. Turn your GPS off on your phones and let's go.”

  


…

 

An hour later, Veronica pushes the speedometer on the car so high it shakes, right along with her. Definitely not a good combination. She's so distracted she comes within centimeters of smashing into a canary yellow delivery truck as it passes her on the otherwise empty forested road and very nearly kills herself. She very nearly kills herself _and_ the other three people in the car.

 

She pulls over as soon as she can, the blaring horn fading into the distance, two hands shaking on the wheel. She climbs into the passenger seat and lets Archie take over. So much for priding herself on her responsible driving.

 

She stares out the window, the pine trees silhouetted gray and graceful against the darkening sky, hands folded in her lap, for a long time. No one says anything, and in her head the silence begins to make a sick kind of sense. She isn't going _anywhere_ , she realizes numbly. Not college, not Seattle, not off into the sunset to see the great wide world. This is it. The investors will win, she knows already, the way you know you're hungry or that it's about to rain, and she's going to have to stay still and quiet for the rest of her life, assuming she doesn't end up dead, which might actually be preferable to her.

 

She's crying again, silent and stupid, and no one notices. No one is looking. All that careful planning, all those maps and magazines, those nights she dreamed herself to sleep. The places she was going to explore, the stories she was going to tell when she got there -- and for what? She stares out at the asphalt road rushing by, the damp, cracked pavement, and feels the boundaries of her life constricting around her. The air feels heavy and oppressive, pushing against the surface of her skin.

 

At long last, she pulls it together, wipes her eyes and scrubs her palms against her skirt. She takes a deep breath as they drive past the welcome sign and arrive at the only destination that makes sense: they're back home again.

 

…

 

It's late, and Betty and Jughead are tired, so Archie drops them off at Jug's trailer so they can rest before they help search the Pembrooke and Archie's house for wiretapping tomorrow morning. After that, he drives to the penthouse, silently gliding up to the curb across the street. He shuts off the engine and Veronica gets out, shoes sinking slightly into the dry, brittle grass. The remains of two broken beer bottle are scattered on the pavement, green and sharp.

 

She takes a long stare at the Pembrooke. It's dark inside and doesn't feel welcoming. She used to think it was some exotic clubhouse, a perfect, safe place. Now it just looks bleak.

 

Archie takes her hand and leads her up the steps.

 

Inside the penthouse, everything is in pristine condition. Nothing seems out of order or misplaced. Still, Veronica goes through the whole house to check for intruders and unlocked windows, and finding nothing, she heads out to the balcony with a cup of coffee and hears Archie come up behind her.

 

“Hey,” he says. He leans against the railing beside her and they stare out at the lights shining through the small town. “We're together, okay?” He turns to her, slides his hands into her hair, and looks into her eyes. “I know it doesn't seem like it now, Ronnie, but I think everything is going to be alright. I _know_ it is. Right now I'm scared, but ten years from now, we'll be so far removed from all of this, and we'll be happy. I'm holding onto that.”

 

Veronica tries to smile. She really doesn't deserve him, and if he were any other boy she'd ever had a fling with, they'd be long gone by now. “Me too,” she says, and kisses him gently.

 

He pulls back to say something else, but just then his words are cut off by the loud, shrill whoop of the fire alarm: Veronica sees his face crease, his eyes widen. “Holy shit,” he says softly, and when Veronica turns to look behind them, she sees smoke leaking from the kitchen.

 

“Oh my God.”

 

“Shit. Move,” Archie says, flipping the handle on the glass doors and pushing her through.

 

“Archie, we might be able to get to the extinguisher--”

 

“Ronnie!” He grabs her arm and steers her toward the front door. Her coffee cup smashes onto the hardwood. “Go.”

 

…

 

The firefighters make it to the Pembrooke faster than Veronica is expecting. She thought she'd have to watch her home go down in flames, but instead she stands shaking in Archie's arms while people rush toward the building with hoses and fire extinguishers.

 

She calls Betty to tell her what happened, and Betty tells her to let her know if anything else happens.

 

Soon after the call ends, her phone starts ringing in her pocket again and she fishes it out to see her father's caller ID on the screen. She swallows and answers.

 

“Veronica?” Her dad sounds panicky and protective. And exhausted. She lets herself worry for one quick minute about the stress he's under with the investors. She feels a pang of missing him. “Where are you?”

 

“I'm at home, Dad,” she says feebly. “There was--”

 

“A fire. I know.”

 

She blinks. “You do?”

 

“Are you alright?”

 

“Yeah, I'm okay. Who told you about the fire?”

 

“One of the neighbors called to tell me they saw the trucks pulling up to the Pembrooke. Are you sure you're fine? How bad is the damage?”

 

“Hang on,” she murmurs as she sees a firefighter making his way towards them. “I think I'm about to find out. Can I call you back?”

 

“Make sure you do.”

 

She ends the call as the firefighter reaches them. It was a candle fire, he reports, small and fast, but the damage in the kitchen is substantial.

 

“We didn't light any candles,” Archie and Veronica say at the same time, and the man says it's common for people to forget about things like that and that it's likely they just lit it without really thinking about it.

 

But as he walks away, Archie and Veronica look at each other, and they can tell from each other's faces that they're both thinking the same thing.

 

Someone did this on purpose.

 

…

 

Back in the lobby, the chief of the fire station gives them a rundown on fire safety and hazards, then gives them the resources they'll need to repair the damage. He says they're probably okay to sleep at the Pembrooke tonight as long as they stay out of the kitchen.

 

They nod, stand up, and thank the chief.

 

“I don't want to stay here,” Veronica tells Archie.

 

He says, “Me neither,” and pushes open the front door of the lobby with one broad shoulder and swears softly as a blast of wind slices inside. “Freezing,” he says, and he takes her hand so casually that she wonders if he even noticed he'd done it. It helps her stay grounded. “Don't you have a jacket?” He wrinkles his pretty nose as they hurry down the steps to the sidewalk.

 

“It was in the kitchen.” The sky looks heavy, full of thick, purple clouds.

 

“Lots of good it's going to do you in there,” he says, opening the passenger door. “Take mine.”

 

Kid has manners, Veronica is reminded, feeling her heart squeeze. Fred had made sure of that. “I'm okay,” she lies.

 

He slides behind the wheel and passes her his varsity jacket. “Just take it, Ronnie. It'll be a few minutes before the car warms up.”

 

She finds herself nodding. “Okay.”

 

Archie steps on the gas.

 

“It's going to cost them a lot of money,” she says. “Not that they can't afford it, but still.”

 

“That's what insurance is for.”

 

“I guess.” She pushes a CD into the stereo, leans her head against the window as the music starts up.

 

…

 

When they get to Archie's house, there's an envelope taped to the front door with this message inside: **10:00 tonight at Riverdale High if you want answers about the fire. Tell no one.**

 

“Seriously?” Veronica mutters.

 

“What do we do?”

 

She shoves the envelope into her pocket and turns back toward the car. “Tell Betty and Jughead, I guess. Betty said to tell her right away if anything else happens, so we'll call them on the way to the school.”

 

“The note says not to tell anyone.”

 

Veronica shoots him a look over her shoulder. “How does the saying go? We don't negotiate with terrorists?”

 

Archie sighs and follows her.

 

Betty and Jughead meet them in the school parking lot fifteen minutes later, and immediately ask to see the note. Betty starts recording with her phone 'just in case.’

 

“Typed,” she observes. “So we can't trace the handwriting.”

 

“Should we look around or go inside?” Archie asks nervously. The building blocks out the moonlight. It's colder than it was earlier, and Veronica moves in close to him.

 

“Let's go in,” Jughead says. “It's freezing.”

 

The doors to the school are surprisingly unlocked, and the hallway is dark inside. Something sticks to Veronica's shoes.

 

“Now what?” she says.

 

Betty opens her mouth to answer but never gets the chance before Veronica's foot kicks something metal, sending it clanking and skittering across the floor and into the darkness. “What was that?”

 

She looks down at her feet and sees four more of what she just booted -- spray paint cans. And in one horrifying moment, she realizes why her shoes are sticking to the ground. Red paint is spilled all over the floor. She looks up at the wall to see what's been spray painted there. The wet paint trails down from the letters like teardrops.

 

Suddenly, Jughead finds a light switch and the bulbs blaze to life, illuminating the newly painted message for the entire school to see.

 

_You will burn._

 

Both Jughead and Archie say, “Shit.”

 

Betty says, “Wow.”

 

Veronica says nothing.

 

And then a voice booms from a bullhorn outside, where red and blue lights flash in the parking lot.

 

“This is the police. Come out immediately.”

 

…

 

Officer Hale identifying himself as the police is a misnomer -- sort of like the adult who rolls out the balls for them in gym class calling himself a teacher. It's accurate only in the most technical sense. Hale’s the school security officer they’re supposed to go to if they're being bullied or if they want to rat on someone. But he can't arrest anyone and he doesn't have a gun, so Veronica has no idea what he actually does.

 

Instead of asking if they're okay, Hale walks in front of the administration office and death marches them into a conference room where he orders them to give up their parents’ phone numbers.

 

“And don't lie to me,” he says. “Because I'll know.”

 

So naturally, Veronica lies. Her parents are already going to kill her, so she might as well postpone the execution as long as possible. Within twenty minutes, the conference room is filled with parents, each of them standing behind their delinquent children. Veronica's the only unclaimed kid, but Archie's dad stands so close to her, she's hoping he'll be mistaken for her parental representative.

 

Minus the incessant tapping Betty's mom is making with her foot, the room is eerily quiet, so it's almost a relief when Weatherbee finally arrives. He's been the principal for twice as long as they've been alive and as far as adult authority figures go, he's one of the more tolerable. Veronica would be fine suffering through this embarrassment if he were the only one here, but no, Vice Principal Stranko’s with him.

 

Veronica’s parents graduated from this very high school with Stranko twenty years ago and she's pretty sure he was voted Most Likely to Be Accused of Police Brutality. Cop, vice principal -- there's really no difference. Supposedly, Stranko's been waiting for Weatherbee to retire so he can take over, but every year Weatherbee returns and it probably makes him want to scream his throat bloody. To make matters worse, Stanko hates Veronica. It turns out he takes it personally if you quit his lacrosse class two days in. Not that Veronica ever wanted to take it in the first place, but it was the only open PE class until she joined the cheer squad and no longer had to take it.

 

“Good evening, everyone,” Weatherbee begins. “This isn't the preferable way to meet. Kids, whatever happened to causing trouble during school hours?” He takes a seat on the other side of the desk. “To keep this orderly, I'd like to hear from Officer Hale first, then the students, before opening the floor to everyone else. Officer Hale, will you get us started?”

 

“Yes sir. At approximately ten o'clock, I received an anonymous text reporting vandalism occurring on school grounds. Living close by, I drove over immediately. I quickly discerned something was amiss because the front lights were on. When I walked in, I found these kids surrounded by empty spray cans and graffitied walls and ordered them to the office and here we are, presently.”

 

“Wait,” Jughead says, his head cocked. “You do know you're not a real cop, right?”

 

FP rolls his eyes in an exhausted _See what I have to live with?_ way before smacking Jughead's head.

 

“Thank you, Officer Hale,” says Weatherbee. “And for the defense?”

 

“We were set up,” Veronica blurts. She glances around at the table, just as surprised by her outburst as everyone else.

 

“Would you care to elaborate?” Weatherbee asks.

 

Archie gives her a nod of encouragement, and when her silent prayer for a sudden embolism isn't answered, she opens her mouth. What follows is a ramble about the fire at the Pembrooke and the instructions to go to the school if they wanted answers about it. It's sloppy storytelling at best, but the longer she talks, the easier the words come. She finishes with, “Right after we saw the graffiti, Hale showed up. And that's it.”

 

Weatherbee looks like he's considering believing her. But Stranko's glaring at her with such intensity she has to look away.

 

“Where are your parents?” Stranko says to her, and then to Hale, “Did you call her parents?”

 

“She said they were out of town. I left a message with her guardian.”

 

“Out of town?” he says to her.

 

“They left yesterday for Seattle for a broadcasting convention. Dad's one of the speakers. I'm staying with a family friend.”

 

“Seattle, huh? And who is this person supposedly watching you?”

 

Stranko sounds like he's going to call bullshit on her. Veronica says nothing.

 

“I asked who's watching you,” Stranko says.

 

And just as Veronica is about to fold, the universe gives her the first real break of her life, and in a moment of perfect timing, the office door opens.

 

…

 

Here's what Veronica knows about Uncle Boyd:

 

He's not Archie's real uncle but he's Fred's oldest friend.

 

He calls himself an artist but Veronica's not sure his so called sculptures qualify as art.

 

And finally, and most importantly, Uncle Boyd sees Archie as the son he's never had, meaning Veronica can trust him.

 

Hopefully.

 

“Sorry I'm late, Mr. 'bee,” he says. “I didn't get the message about Veronica until a few minutes ago. I must have had the radio up too loud.” Uncle Boyd's wearing ripped jeans and a paint splattered graphic t shirt. He comes up behind Veronica and nods to Stranko.

 

“Howdy, Dwayne. Been awhile.”

 

Stranko flinches. “With students in the room, Boyd, I prefer to be called Mr. Stranko.”

 

“I'll do my best, Dwayne. I mean Mr. Stranko. Sir.”

 

“So is Veronica staying with you, Boyd?” Mr. Weatherbee says.

 

“For the next few days, yeah. It doesn't look like I've been doing a very good job watching her. Sorry about that.”

 

Stranko's looking all _bullshit_ again but doesn't say anything.

 

Weatherbee says, “She was just filling us in on the evening. Veronica, do you have any evidence to back up your story?”

 

She holds out the note. Stranko lays it on the table before taking a picture with his phone.

 

“Anything else?”

 

“I have a video too,” Betty says. She unlocks her phone then passes it over to Weatherbee. Stranko and Hale crowd behind him but they only make it through 15 seconds of them in front of the school talking before Weatherbee turns it off.

 

“I don't think I need to hear anymore. Is there any other information you'd like to share?”

 

All four of them collectively shrug.

 

“So what happens now?” Fred asks.

 

Weatherbee steeples his fingers under his chin for a moment, then says, “On the one hand, it's clear to me these students are not responsible for the vandalism. Do you agree Mr. Stranko?”

 

Stranko nods but without much confidence behind it. Veronica gets the feeling he almost wishes they were the culprits.

 

“On the other hand,” Weatherbee says, “we have a very clear policy regarding trespassing on school grounds that was spelled out at the beginning of the year. That is something that must be addressed. So tomorrow after school you will each take part in painting over the graffiti in the hallway. I believe two hours working may help deter you from coming onto school property again after hours.”

 

“How is that fair?” Betty's mom asks. “You even said they didn't do it. To punish them for that is ridiculous. I don't see how--”

 

“Or,” Weatherbee says, staring at Betty's mom, “we could simply hand them over to the Riverdale police department and let them handle the trespassing violation. You could transport them to the station, could you not, Mr. Hale?”

 

The staredown doesn't last long. Alice mumbles something under her breath.

 

Weatherbee stands and says, “If there's nothing else, we all have an early morning tomorrow.”

 

They all follow her lead and stand. Archie, probably worried she's about to make a break for the door, puts a light hand on Veronica's arm.

He doesn't have to worry about that though. She just wishes her troubles could be chalked up to the thrill of juvenile delinquency and not the ominous threat that the message in the hallway carries.


	11. Chapter 11

FP forces Jughead home and Uncle Boyd goes upstairs to catch up with Fred while Archie, Veronica, and Betty gather around the island in Archie's kitchen.

 

“I'm keeping watch down here tonight,” Archie says, eyeing his old worn baseball bat.

 

Veronica knows about the nights he spent down here with that bat during the Black Hood attacks, countless sleepless hours he committed to keeping his dad safe. She can't have him doing that again, not with how irrational and unstable it could make him.

 

“No,” she says. She reaches out and touches his arm below the elbow, warm skin and the rope of muscle underneath. “Seriously, please don’t. We’ll figure it out.”   
  
Archie rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t argue. Veronica likes that—that he still seems to trust her judgment. That he doesn’t try to convince her he knows best like everyone else in her life seems to do. For a moment she follows his gaze out the window to the tree line; the back of his house faces the woods, this wide expanse of uninterrupted green. She forgot how much she missed this when they were in New York.

 

“Okay,” he says, sliding his arm back until their hands catch, squeezing for a moment before he lets go. The gesture sends a clanging all the way up into her elbow, like she banged her funny bone. “But I just—I know your life has basically been one long, uninterrupted shitshow since you got to Riverdale. And with that message tonight…” He shakes his head again, trailing off.

 

For a second she thinks about the feeling of his warm mouth pressing at hers. She feels safe when she's with Archie, like this gathering in his kitchen is for hatching a getaway plan and they’re headed for the border by nightfall. It’s not exactly an unattractive thing to pretend.

 

“You're right,” Veronica concedes that point easily. “And you know it's because of my parents.”

 

Archie and Betty both look at her then, and she continues.

 

With one nervous exhale, she lowers her voice and says, “What if we involve the police?”

 

Archie knits his eyebrows together. “But you said your parents--”

 

“My parents,” she says quietly, “have done nothing to protect me. Or you. Or Betty and Jughead. So why,” she asks shakily, “am I protecting them?”

 

For one long moment, Archie just stares at her face. He's looking at her like he's known her his whole life. He's looking at her like she surprises him every day.

 

“If that's what you want to do, V,” Betty says then, “that's what we'll do.”

 

Veronica nods sharply. “I think we need to collect whatever information we can on each of the investors,” she's still keeping her voice low and controlled to avoid being picked up by any potential bugs, as well as to prevent Fred and Uncle Boyd from catching on. “Which means it'll mostly be me doing a bunch of research. I just don't want them to be able to escape if they figure out what we're doing.”

 

“And the possibility of your parents going to jail,” Betty says. “I mean, you're still a minor, Veronica. If they….”

 

“Where would you go?” Archie asks, alarmed. “Would they put you in foster care or something like they tried to do to Jughead?”

 

Veronica shrugs, sour. “I have family in New York, but that doesn't matter. We'll cross that bridge if we even come to it. It's a risk I'm willing to take.”

 

Right then her phone rings, loud and bright. It's her mom.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Ronnie? Mija, are you okay?”

 

Veronica shifts her weight a little, uncomfortable. Already she feels guilt eating at her like it's making a home inside her.  _ Just hatching a plan that involves you potentially being locked up in prison, _ she imagines saying. “I’m fine.”

 

“Good,” says her mom. “We're coming home.”

 

Just like that. “What?” Veronica barks. “Why? When?”

 

“We're done negotiating with the investors, it's not getting us anywhere. We're going to regroup back in Riverdale to consider our next steps.”

 

“Are you  _ serious _ ?” Her voice is shrill now. “Mom--”

 

“We'll see you soon. I love you.”

 

The line disconnects.

 

…

 

Veronica feels like breaking something. She's  _ shaking _ with anger.

 

“Calm down, Ronnie,” Archie says after she tells him what her mom said.

 

“No!” she howls, quick and bursting. She slams her palms down flat on the cool wooden island. “I'm not going to calm down when these people who don't even actually  _ love _ me are going to come running back into town like some kind of morally bankrupt Bonnie and Clyde with their guns still smoking just to try to tie me up and destroy everything, probably just to get us all  _ killed _ .”

 

“Veronica, your parents do love you, okay?” Archie says, and his voice is infuriatingly collected. “You’re just overwhelmed and it’s making it hard for you to see that.”

 

“Oh,  _ am I _ ?” she all but shouts, whirling in his direction; suddenly she is so monstrously, ferociously angry. She’s angry about the fire and the message tonight. She’s angry that she kind of wishes he’d never gotten involved with her. She’s angry that since the very beginning, the consequences of whatever her parents do has always fallen squarely on her, whether that meant people whispering that she was a criminal as she passed them in the hallway, or her lying on her back on an exam table at a hospital after a bombing, imagining herself into a cloud. It’s not even a hostile act on their part, and even if they do love her, it’s just how it works. Her parents get away with things. She pays for them. Her parents move on. She gets stuck.

 

But she can’t say that in the middle of his kitchen while his father is upstairs and Betty stands less than four feet away. She can’t say that  _ ever _ , probably, but especially not now. So she sighs, tucking her hair behind her ears and trying to zip herself up, taking a few steps closer and lowering her voice to an acceptable pitch. “Nevermind,” she tells him. “Just forget it, okay?”

 

“I don’t want to forget it,” he argues. “Come on, Ronnie. It’s me. We can go up to my room if you need to talk.”

 

She knows she should leave it alone, that there’s nothing to be gained here, but something small and stubborn in her isn’t quite ready to concede the point: “What?” she can’t resist pressing. “You think my parents are going to come home and we’ll be all made up? Everything will be fine? We’re just going to add the entirety of the last month to the list of things we’re not going to talk about and move on with our lives in perfect artificial happiness?”

 

Archie leans back against the counter with his arms crossed, like she’s someone’s irascible toddler. “No. But I think what matters is that they’ll be here to help keep you safe.” Veronica makes a face at that and he says, “Okay, enough over there please, tiger. I’m not saying you need to forgive your parents right away or that there’s not a crap ton of stuff that still needs to be worked out or that the danger level isn’t still at a thousand. But now we have a plan that involves the law and your parents aren’t going to be hundreds of miles away and completely unhelpful.”

 

It’s the winning shot, a three-pointer from midcourt, and both of them know it. Still, Veronica digs her heels in. “It’s more complicated than that,” she insists.

 

Archie raises his eyebrows. “Really?” he asks. “How?”

 

“Because—” she starts, then breaks off in frustration. She doesn’t have an answer, not really. By now she’s fully aware she’s being stupid, picking a fight with him over this—quite seriously, what kind of spoiled brat throws a tantrum at the fact that her parents are coming home?—but the truth is she just feels so  _ foolish _ . She wants to punish her parents for the hell they’ve caused. She wants them to feel foolish too. Deep down in the smallest, darkest caverns of her heart, she knows that’s the real reason she’s so upset.

 

“Just forget it,” she repeats finally, when all she can come up with is a belligerent shrug of her shoulders. “I need space to think. I'm going out.”

 

“No, Ronnie--”

 

“I'll be careful,” she snaps, still hot tempered. Grabs the keys to her father's sleek car and gets the hell out.

 

She's just sliding into the driver's seat when Betty comes running out after her.

 

“V,” she says, a little breathless, “let me come with you.”

 

A small part of Veronica wants to tell Betty she should just go home, that exactly everyone who gets too close to her ends up hurt and she doesn't want that for Betty. Still, she has a feeling she wouldn't be able to scare her away that easily, and besides, storming out of here alone is pushing her luck in a pretty spectacular fashion, so finally she just nods and tells Betty to get in.

 

They drive for over an hour, not really talking. It feels weirdly peaceful to be in the car, steadying, like they're in a climate controlled bubble. She knows it can't possibly last, but for awhile it's nice to pretend.

 

As she turns back onto Archie’s street she sees a crow flying in lazy circles against the dark sky, swooping low then righting itself gracefully.

 

She's pulling back into Archie's driveway when Toni comes running out onto the front walk, her lovely face worried and drawn. Veronica blinks in surprise: Toni wasn't at the house when they left. A second after that she's hit with a cold blast of fear. She gets the door open as quick as she can, her thoughts tumbling over each other and the memory of her phone ringing the night of Betty and Jughead's crash right at the center, like the eye of a devastating storm.

 

“What happened?” she demands loudly, fumbling to unbuckle her seatbelt and climb out. “Toni.”

 

Toni holds her hands up, shakes her head. “Veronica,” she says before she can get out of the car. “It's Archie.”

 

…

 

The last time Veronica was in a hospital was the day of the bombing. She spent twenty one hours lying on sterile white sheets and the great majority of the wakeful ones crushing ice chips between her molars and praying. She stared at the bland yellow walls of the ICU. She cried a little.

 

The time before that was the night of the crash.

 

Her dark eyes are wide as she rushes through the doors of the ER, her heart like a house on fire and a mechanical jolt rattling deep inside her bones. She wants to scream Archie's name. She wants to run through this hospital until she finds him. Instead she stands frozen and helpless in the waiting room as a million different emotions flicker like old home movies across her face: Shock. Confusion. Heartbreak.

 

“Why didn't either of you have your cell phones?” Jughead demands before anything else. The front of his shirt is soaked in blood. Someone else's blood. He looks unkempt, pacing like a lion around the waiting room. “I tried to call you a thousand times.”

 

“Toni met us at the house,” Veronica says, shaking her head, trying to clear it. “What's going on? Where's Archie?”

 

“He's in surgery. He walked out onto his porch and someone shot him.”

 

“I  _ know _ ,” Veronica snaps. “Toni said. What else?”

 

“They brought him upstairs a few minutes ago. He has a ruptured spleen.”

 

“Is that dangerous?”

 

“No more dangerous than getting shot,” Jughead retorts, his face twisting meanly.

 

“You don't have to be so rude, Jughead,” Betty says.

 

“You should have had your phones.”

 

“We left in a hurry,” Betty replies.

 

A fresh wave of fear and dread rolls through Veronica, remembering her dramatic exit. She can't believe she talked to him like that when he was just trying to help her. “I was horrible to him earlier. With Betty. Fred was upstairs. We got in a fight.” She can barely get the words out. It feels like some cruel and unusual déjà vu for this to be happening and she tries not to follow that train of thought to its conclusion, how they might never be able to make up before he--

 

“Jesus, Veronica,” Jughead says. “Fred is here. He went to wash the blood off his hands.” He glances over his shoulder toward the bathrooms. “Let's just sit down.”

 

...

 

If the walls of the hospital waiting room could talk, they’d speak of feigned talks of weather and whispers to God. She sits in one of the hard, stain resistant arm chairs, unmoving in the immaculate, antiseptic silence. She’d always thought Riverdale was a quiet town, all chapels and cul-de-sacs and cobblestone sidewalks made uneven by tree roots, but now it just feels loud and bright and overwhelming, like she’s walking around with her organs on the outside of her body. Everything feels screamingly, ferociously raw.

 

She stands abruptly and moves toward the double doors leading to the back hallways where Archie is. She knows she can’t actually go through them and try to find him, but still she stands right beside them, glancing occasionally through the rectangular glass windows. She’s halfway through her fifth mental speech about what a terrible person she is when someone pushes their way through one of the doors and clears his throat. She blinks, glancing up at the doctor.

 

He smiles a sheepish smile. “Ma’am,” he says, “you’re really not supposed to be standing here.”

 

Veronica feels herself blush deep and red, shame flooding down all the way to the soles of her shoes. “I’m sorry.” It’s such a small,  _ stupid _ thing, wanting to be as close to Archie as she possibly can be even if that means standing in a forbidden spot in the waiting room, but getting called out for it by a stranger flies directly in the face of everything she’s trying to be now: someone who doesn’t cause any problems. “Sorry,” she says again, then breaks off, swallowing hard. She knows this is just stress getting the better of her, a flood of emotion dialed up to a thousand, but suddenly she isn’t at all certain she’s not about to burst into tears.

 

It must be achingly clear on her face, because the doctor’s face shifts to mild concern. “Is there anything I can get you?”

 

Veronica bites the inside of her tongue until she tastes iron. God, she is not about to have a breakdown in front of this person just because he’d been unlucky enough to talk to her. She is not going to have anymore breakdowns at  _ all _ , not ever, but she is most definitely not going to have one right now. “I’m sorry,” she says again, more calmly this time. “I’ll go sit down.” She looks at him then. “Do you know anything about one of the patients here, Archie Andrews? He arrived about an hour and a half ago--”

 

“Ah yes, the gunshot victim. He’s still in surgery, but as soon as there’s an update on him, you’ll be the first person I tell.”

 

Veronica forces a small smile and a nod and sinks back into her plastic chair. It’s cold in here. It’s only a couple of weeks before Spring break but Riverdale is still freezing and damp, the Winter clinging endlessly on. It had snowed  _ again _ when she and Betty were out driving earlier, both of them looking out the windows and groaning in unison when the fat flakes began to come down, and now she picks at the slushy black remains of it on her heeled ankle boots.

 

She remembers the first night her parents told her about the threats and the wooden box they’d received, how she’d been out that night with Archie and Betty and Jughead, and how Archie had walked her home in the rain. “Easy,” he’d said, catching her hand when she almost slipped over the water-slicked sidewalk. “I gotcha.” He'd made some kind of good-natured joke after that, a joke Veronica tries desperately to remember now, but she can't -- all she can recall is the feeling it gave her, happiness and some kind of thinly veiled hope that spread over her skin.

 

It was one of the things she liked first and best about Archie, how silly and self aware he could be for someone so devoted and focused; getting to know him was like finding a secret late night dance party in the green lampshade reading room in the library. She thinks about his smile, slow and steady. You could light the Empire State building with that smile. She loves his brain and his heart and the person she is when she’s with him. The person he makes her want to be. And that’s the truest definition of love, really -- wanting to be the best version of yourself for someone else. If that’s the case, Veronica has been in love with Archie since the very first days she met him.

 

He’s too good to her, she thinks now, suddenly as close to tears as she’d been just a few moments ago with the doctor. She doesn’t deserve it, after everything that’s happened. She doesn’t deserve  _ him. _ This was a guy who read to little kids at a Head Start for his service project over the summer and confessed to missing his mom so much it sometimes brought him to tears one of the first times they hung out together. He'd been honest and good from the beginning. The last thing he’d ever needed was her stomping into his calm and steady life with her talent for drama and flair for catastrophe, leaving her muddy tracks across his floor.

 

When the doctor walks back out a few moments later and asks who Archie's family is, she comes back to herself like a swimmer resurfacing from deep underwater, breathless and improperly depressurized. 

 

“He made it through the surgery.”

 

…

 

There are complications, the doctor tells them vaguely -- medical terms Veronica can scarcely understand even when he explains them. He's still not stable. Not even close.

 

Two more hours turn into three, then four, then five -- and soon it's nearly morning. Veronica wants to crawl out of her skin. She skulks around by the entrance to the back hallway of the ER. She calls her own phone on the hospital's landline, on the off chance she's somehow stopped getting service.

 

“Well,” she mutters out loud when it rings just right as rain -- thinking about Archie, thinking about her parents, thinking about all the things she doesn't actually know.  _ Well _ .

 

She doesn't cry. She works instead. She goes through digital folders of her parents’ contacts, accessible to her through their joint family files. She digs out a notepad and pen and writes down all the information she can recall about each investor she saw in New York, once she can find their contact listed with pictures. Seeing their names brings back more ancient memories from her childhood and how these people never used to make her feel unsafe. She retraces her old routes and makes notes: Harrison went on a business trip with her parents to Macedonia and Mykonos, Celine vanished for an entire summer and came back claiming she'd been backpacking in Joshua Tree and Big Sky.

 

That works okay to distract her some of the time; the rest of the time, not so much.

 

Tired of watching her pace the waiting room like a zoo animal, Fred sends her out on whatever errands he can think of: coffee, Tylenol, tissues. She turns up the heater and drives. That doesn't really help, either, though; at one point she gets anxious about intruders and heads south toward Archie's suburban neighborhood and to his house, a bag of drug store items in the passenger seat beside her. The windows are dark, driveway empty. She cruises by again to make sure.

 

…

 

When she walks back into the waiting room, her mother is there. Hermione gets to her feet immediately, eyes locked on her daughter and filled with obvious relief.

 

“Mom,” Veronica says when her mom wraps her arms around her tight. She steps back. “Maybe you shouldn't be here.”

 

Hermione shakes her head resolutely. Somewhere under the hospital stench, Veronica can smell her, the lavender-sandalwood perfume she’s worn since Veronica was a baby. She hasn’t changed at all since she left Riverdale: the silver ring on her finger, her tissue-thin black cardigan and her heels. When she was little Veronica thought her mom was the most beautiful woman in the world. Whenever she’d go on business trips, Veronica used to lie on her stomach in front of the windows in their living room overlooking all of New York and stare at the pictures in her parents’ wedding album, her mom in her ballroom gown.

 

_ The night Ronnie came home _ was a staple bedtime story when she was a kid. “I saw you right when you were born and knew we were meant for each other,” her mom liked to tell her, both of them tucked under the duvet, her small feet brushing Hermione's kneecaps and her hair a tangled mess over the pillows, undone from her braids and bows. “I loved you instantly, Ronnie baby. All I wanted in the whole world was to be your mom.”   
  
Hermione Lodge, if nothing else, has never lacked the imagination to craft a tall tale.   
  
Okay, possibly Veronica is editorializing a little. Still, for somebody who wanted a baby so badly, it’s always been kind of funny to her how emphatically not maternal her mother is. Not in an ice-queen, Cinderella stepmother kind of way -- she was never mean or cruel, she always told her she loved her, and she believed her -- but in a way where she was just kind of bored by kid stuff, Veronica and her cousins yelling their heads off in the playroom all day long. It was like she’d woken up one day to find some foreign storybook creature living in her house with her and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Maybe that makes sense, though—after all, she wanted a baby.   
  
And that baby turned into—well. Veronica.

 

“No, honey, I'm here for you. I spoke to Archie's dad. Have you been able to sleep at all?” Hermione presses the back of her hand to Veronica's cheek like she's checking for a fever.

 

Veronica shakes her head. “My house was set on fire, remember?”

 

Hermione physically recoils, then collects herself. “I know. We're having the damage repaired. In the meantime we're staying at the Five Seasons.”

 

“Where's Daddy?” Veronica asks then, feeling vaguely sick.

 

“He's still in New York,” her mom admits. “He'll be flying in tomorrow. But right now, Ronnie, I think you need to get some rest, okay? I know things have been out of hand here since your father and I left.”

 

“I'm not leaving Archie,” Veronica says right away.

 

Fred stands up then, walking over to them. “It's okay, Veronica. You really do need to sleep. Archie would be saying the same thing if he knew what was going on out here. I promise I'll call you right away if there's any kind of update.”

 

Veronica is about to argue some more, but her eyes are burning and she's feeling so foggy and spacey that when Fred gently says, “Go on. Go with your mother,” she lets Hermione lead her out of the building.

 

…

  
“I don’t deserve this,” Veronica says when Hermione brings her a hot cup of tea, setting it on the bedside table and flipping the channels on the hotel TV until she finds a bright, soothing rerun. “Mom, really. After everything—I just don’t.”   
  
Her mom’s face gets very tight then, her lips disappearing and her shoulders going sharp. She grabs the remote again and clicks the TV off, plunging the room into silence; Veronica thinks she’s upset with her for being ungrateful until she realizes her eyes are full of tears.   
  
“I never want to hear you say that again,” she tells her, her voice low and urgent. It’s the only time Veronica’s seen her cry since all of this began; it’s one of the first times she’s seen her cry in her entire life. “You deserve everything, do you hear me? You are smart and you are kind and you are hardworking, and this doesn’t change any of that. None of it is your fault.” She sniffles once and gazes at her for a moment, waiting. “Do you understand?”   
  
Veronica fists her hands in the clean white sheets, nods. “Yes,” She says quietly. She doesn’t believe her, not really, but she wants—in this small way, at least—to be obedient and good. “I understand.”   
  
Her mom nods back like the matter is settled—the terms agreed on, the contract signed. “All right,” she says. “Now drink your tea and get some rest.”


	12. Chapter 12

Overnight it’s like something heavy and poisonous bursts open inside Veronica, a cyst or a tumor: she wakes up sobbing into the hotel mattress, and she can’t for the breathing life of her stop.

_Archie._   
  
She could handle the rest of it, but _Archie_ being laid in a hospital bed, having a bullet inside his body, somewhere between life and death? _She can't handle that._ She finally ruined everything; she finally destroyed it all.   
  
She lays there for a while, curled in a ball and wracked with it, but eventually crying that hard makes her feel like she's going to throw up, so she forces herself into the bathroom, which is what wakes her mom up, and where she finds her when she comes in what could be minutes or hours later, Veronica's not sure.   
  
“What’s wrong?” she asks urgently, flying through the doorway and dropping right down onto the tile beside her, getting her arms around her shoulders and squeezing tight. She smells like lavender, her pajamas soft and cool against Veronica's damp, blotchy skin. “Ronnie, babe, what happened? What’s wrong?”   
  
Veronica blinks at her through her tears, surprised: Even back before communication went solidly to shit in their house, the two of them weren’t really huggers. It’s basically the sum total of the physical contact they’ve had all month and right now it only makes her cry more, way too hard to answer her mother with words. Her breath is this awful shuddering wheeze, this feeling of being physically crushed like how they used to kill witches in Massachusetts, slabs of rock piled one after another on her chest. She feels like she's running a marathon she hasn’t trained for at all.   
  
“Ronnie, babe,” she says again, warm breath at her temple. It’s like some weird dormant instinct is taking over for her, stroking through Veronica's hair and rubbing her back like she can’t remember her doing in a really long time. “Shh. You’re okay,” she promises. “I’m here; your mom’s here. You’re okay.”   
  
_Your mom’s here. You’re okay._

“We don't have to talk about it,” Hermione promises quietly, and it sounds like an absolution. “We can just sit here. We don’t.”  
  
So that’s what they do, the two Lodge women, on the floor beside the hotel bathtub, the tile cool and clean. Eventually, the tears stop coming. Neither one of them says a word.

 

...

 

Archie's mom is in the waiting room when Veronica shows up early the next morning, both of them looking a little wrecked. Fred is asleep on the chair beside her, eyelids rimmed red.

“Hi, Veronica,” she says when she sees her. The butterflies in Veronica's chest thrum their papery wings.   
  
“Hi, Mrs. Andrews,” she says.   
  
“Hi, Veronica,” she says again, expression neutral as the paint on the walls in the hospital. “Archie hasn't woken up yet.”   
  
She nods, trying to mirror the bland look on her face. Of course Veronica already knows Archie hasn't woken up yet.

Nothing else traumatic or ridiculous or bizarre has happened since last night, but that sort of makes sense to Veronica. The investors probably thought their _welcome home fuck you_ campaign would keep her quiet and stagnant a little longer than this, and honestly, she sort of thinks it should have -- but rather than shattering her completely, their attack on Archie has given her absolute focus and clarity. She only has one goal now. She wants scorched Earth. She wants ruin. She wants to destroy them.

But first, she needs to be here. Even if Archie hasn't woken up. Even if there's no telling when he will. Or if he will.

For a second the sight of Mary Andrews makes Veronica feel like she's in a soup-thick fog, like maybe she knows Archie is in this hospital because of _her_ , but then Mary smiles at her a little, and the sight of it, her flowered dress and her cork-heeled shoes, is enough to have Veronica swallowing back tears. “How are you feeling?” Mary asks.   
  
_Don’t be nice to me_ , she wants to tell her. _Don’t be nice to me, I’m awful, I don’t deserve it, I did the worst thing I could possibly do._ For one moment she wants to tell Archie's mom everything, to pour it all out regardless of the mess it would make, to stand back and stare at the horribleness of it like the world’s ugliest piece of art.   
  
Then she realizes she never wants to tell anyone ever.   
  
“Hanging in there,” she says instead, shaking her head resolutely.

 

...

 

Jughead and Betty show up a few minutes later, and after an hour the three of them head out to find something to eat, offer to bring coffee back for Archie's parents. The sky above the town is purple-gray and heavy-looking, threatening a biblical kind of rain. Sure enough, they're in the parking lot of Pop's when it starts to pour.  
  
The rain falls cold and fast and steady as they walk inside and order the lightest of breakfasts and the strongest of coffee.

“So,” Jughead says once they're seated in their usual booth, he and Betty on one side and Veronica alone on the other. If Archie was here he'd be next to her, their ribs pressed together like an instinct to get close to whatever's warm. Raindrops streak down the window beside the booth. “Everyone holding up?”

Betty just shrugs a little, her hands wrapped tight around her mug, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold. “Kind of,” she says, then looks at Veronica. “V?”

“I'm a mess,” Veronica admits finally, tearing her English muffin into crumbs instead of looking at Betty and Jughead. The regret is physical, copper-bitter at the back of her mouth.

“It's not your fault, Veronica,” Betty says firmly.

“Isn’t it, though?” she argues. “I make the same mistakes over and over. I'm not careful.” It was just a few days ago that she braved the trip back home to New York—and, true to form, wound up making a million poor choices.  
  
But: that was then, she reminds herself, before Archie was shot and a million miles away. She moves through space more gently now. She’s careful about where she steps. “Once I hand over all the information I have to the police,” she says softly, “what’s to say I'm not going to ruin everything even more?”

“You are careful, though,” Betty insists. “You're diplomatic and you use your head to think through everything. You never should have had to deal with any of this, but you are, and you're doing a better job at it than you give yourself credit for.”

Jughead sets his mug down. “You're smart, Veronica. Okay? And you're brave. You can do this.”

Veronica shakes her head a little, smiling wryly. “You're saying that because you're worried I'm about to fill my pockets with rocks and walk into Sweetwater River.”

That makes all of them smile, quickly, like a lighter that’s almost out of juice catching just for a second, that spark that’s there and gone. The three of them are incomplete here, the feeling of _wrongness_ undeniable. Something's missing. Archie's missing.

“I'm filing the police report,” Veronica says. “Today.”

Betty reaches across the table to hold her hand, icy cold fingers that Veronica doesn't want to let go of, like maybe physical attachment will mean she can't be taken away. “Do you want us to come with you?”

“Yes, actually,” Veronica says, and then tilts her face up at the glass window, like she's trying to wring sunshine out of the clouds. “We should go now.”

 

…

 

Veronica feels like she's suffocating as she walks into the police station, Betty and Jughead at her side. She wonders if her dad's plane has landed yet, if he's already here. Wonders if she and her parents have been running orbits around each other all over town since she snuck out of her mom's hotel room this morning. She clutches her file folder close. She made copies of everything. Every investor. All of their crimes and all of the evidence, countless numbers of them tied directly to Lodge Industries. Federal cases that could send her parents to prison, but Veronica did her best to leave out any mention of their names. Even after everything, even now, when she could turn her back on them in _well deserved_ anger, she did her best to protect them. She thinks that's all they could ask of her anyway.

She gets called back and sits there with the officers for what feels like forever, and for the first time, she says everything out loud. A low, nauseated chill swoops through her gut as she lets it all out, her brain pinging out in a hundred different directions. The very first night when it was storming and her parents showed her the box. The motorcycle crash. The bombing at the school. The trip to New York. The fire. The threat spray painted on the wall.

The shooting.

Everything.

They ask her so many questions her head spins. They fill notepads up and have to find new ones for all the things they're writing down. They ask her to tell the whole thing again. They look floored as they read over Veronica's files on the investors, the numberless crimes and offenses. They call specialists in from out of state right there in front of her. They take statements from Betty and Jughead. They tell her not to move.

Finally, after so many hours, when the sky has gone all chalky and dark, they let the three of them go with a deputy and a case number and a reference for a therapist. They tell them not to leave town.

 

…

 

Archie is stable.

Not awake, but stable. Not okay, but alive, and that's enough for right now. When they walk back into the waiting room and Mary tells them so, Veronica lets herself fall apart a little, like she's finally releasing some of the tension and terror she's been clutching close since the moment she saw Toni in Archie's driveway.

Jughead and Betty sit sentry in the waiting room, but Veronica heads for the chapel.

She stands in the center aisle and stares up at Jesus on the cross, her gaze fixed. She thinks about the impossible burden she's been carrying, not because she's _capable_ of carrying it, but because she has no choice. For all the things she's done wrong, she finds some resemblance of comfort in the conclusion that Jesus did the same thing, took up a bone breaking burden for the ones he loved. She finds comfort here, in the belief that somehow she's already forgiven and understood and loved in a way she's not capable of comprehending.

After today -- after finally saying everything out loud and after finally turning it all over to the police -- she feels almost lifted of that burden, in a strange way. Almost free. Almost like she's floating. Almost.

The chapel doors open behind her, quiet. She knows who it is before she _knows_ , so when she turns to look at him, she's immediately nervous but not shocked.

Her father lets the door shut softly, and then looks back at her.

She feels the nerves stir in her stomach -- a warm prickly rush of guilt and anxiety, though she knows there was a time when she felt safer with her father than with anyone else on earth. “Daddy,” she straightens. “How was the flight?” she asks, trying not to sound afraid. Her hands move in front of her like butterflies. Her toes curl down against her shoes on the velvet carpet.

He walks down the aisle and takes a seat to her right. “Sit down, mija,” he tells her, and she does, perching on the edge of the pew beside him, feet still planted on the carpet like at any second she might jump up and bolt.

He reaches out and takes her hand then, and she can't even remember the last time he offered her a comforting gesture like that. “Ronnie,” he says, just quiet. “The police called me. I know you told them everything. I know you filed a report.”

She swallows, withdraws her hand from his. “Daddy, I--”

“I want to talk to you about the last time we were in this chapel,” he says then.

“I’m sorry,” she says immediately, trying to avoid the inevitable lecture: If he’s going to lay into her again, she’d rather just take the blame right off the bat and be done with it, preempt the whole affair. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that when I yelled at you.”

“It’s not that,” he says, which is surprising. He shakes his head, sighs a little. “I owe you an apology.”

“It’s just been a really difficult—” she stops. “You do?”

“I do.” There’s something stilted about his speech, like he’s been practicing. She waits. “You were right, Ronnie,” he begins after a moment, “about what you said here. I didn’t protect you after--” He breaks off, tries   
again. “Once the box and the message came from my former colleagues. I was angry. You know that. I let awful things happen to you, and I’m ashamed of myself for that. I’m sorry.” He swallows. “This isn’t the life I imagined for you.” 

She shrugs, hands still twisting in her lap. She tucks them between her knees to still them. “It’s not the life I imagined for me, either.”

“I know. But as your dad, I think it felt -- it felt like a personal failure to me, to see you affected by my misdeeds. But that’s not an excuse.” Her father sighs again; he looks so old, his face gone slightly slack. “I did a terrible job once I found out it was my investors. I did a miserable, pathetic job. You probably needed your parents more than you’d ever needed your parents in your entire life, and what did I do? I went to New York and left you alone.” 

Veronica starts to deny it, an absurd reflex. It’s bizarre to hear him talk this way.

Finally she nods. “Yeah,” she tells him, which is about all she can manage. “It’s been hard.”

“But look at you,” he says. “You’ve handled yourself with a lot of grace. You’re responsible. You've done a good job. You might think I don’t notice that, but I do.”

She feels her eyes start to well up, that familiar clog in her throat. She feels like she's been on the verge of crying for the last month. “Thanks.”

“I know a lot of people have left you in your life,” he tells her, and that’s when the tears start for real. He gets a little closer, puts a hand on her back. “Especially me.” His arm slides down around her shoulder, pulls her close; he smells like laundry detergent. “But what I want to tell you, mija, is that that’s not going to happen again, all right? I’m not going anywhere. The police told me there was nothing blatantly incriminating of your mother and I in the files you gave them. We erased all the information our investors had on the nature of our crimes; that was our main objective in going to New York. They can't expose our past and the evidence is all gone. But no matter what happens, what you do or where you go -- I'm not going to let anyone hurt you again.”

Well, that does it. All of a sudden it’s like he’s given her permission to let go of everything she's been holding on to so tightly -- the guilt and fear she’s walked around with since that first stormy night, the huge anger that’s burrowed in behind her ribs. She rests her head on his shoulder and lets herself cry a little, leave a wet splotch on his shirt the way she hasn't done since she was a little girl. Her father strokes a hand through her hair. She knows this won’t fix everything between them -- she knows they have many, many miles to walk -- but it feels, at the very least, like a start.

“Well.” Her father sits forward a bit, exhales like he’s sort of exhausted himself. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for everything. And if there’s something -- I’d like to try to make it up to you.”

She struggles for a moment, trying to fit all the pieces together -- to come up with some cure-all, a plan for living their lives in a new way. She's about to tell him to forget it, that both of them just need time -- when all of a sudden it occurs to her, as clear and as terrifying as the Book of Revelation. “I need your blessing for something,” she tells him.

He hesitates for a moment, but to his great credit, he comes through. “Name it.”

She raises her head, wipes her eyes, and stares at her father dead-on. “I’m going to take a trip.”

 

...

 

Archie wakes up late that night, Mary rousing Veronica awake from her fidgety sleep in her plastic chair. Her heart soars.

She's so excited to see him she can barely contain it as his parents head up to visit him first. She thinks of his goofy stories, the interested way he chats with every last person in town; she thinks of how he knows her ugly parts and likes her anyway, how he’s not perpetually disappointed by the person she turned out to be.

When she gets to see him, to go up to his room, she nearly breaks down again, but he's looking at her through tired eyes and he's smiling.

He’s not touching her at all, but she can feel him everywhere, so many atoms vibrating between them that it seems like the air should make a sound.

For a moment she just stands there, motionless, rooted in place like one of the hundred-year-old maple trees lining the shore of Sweetwater River.

Then she goes to him.

It’s insane, the effect Archie has on her -- like a storm at sea clearing, like a hurricane calming down. The churning in her stomach disappears the moment he catches her and all of a sudden everything seems so worth it. There’s nothing tortured or painful about being with him. Everything about him is easy and good.  
  
“Hey, you,” Archie says, laughing, wires and gauze between them. His arms feel like a life preserver, feel safe. “Missed me, huh?”

She nods. “I love you,” she answers, clinging to him. He tips his face close to hers.

He wants to kiss her. She knows because she wants to kiss him, too.

It used to be that Archie was kind of shy when he kissed her, all bashful and hesitant like he was scared he was going to break her if he pushed even a hair too hard.  
  
This... does not feel like that.   
  
This feels like a fire in the forest, like one of those carnival rides where the floor drops out and force is the only thing keeping you stuck to the wall. It's relief. It's an apology. It's a promise. She sighs and drops her forehead to his shoulder.

“I'm so sorry,” she murmurs.

“Stop,” he whispers, fingers in her hair, and she shakes her head, sits up.

“I'm the reason this happened to you,” she says. Outside it's raining again, a million drops of water illuminated in the yellow glow of the streetlamp by the window. “So just let me apologize.”

Archie reaches for her again and she leans back into him. “There's no need for that,” he replies, and looks at her. “You don't have to blame yourself anymore.”

“I--”

“You're smart. And caring. And willing to do anything to keep the people you love safe.” He shakes his head like this is something obvious, a fact as old as the universe itself. He smiles a little. “And you are. Like. The prettiest girl I've ever seen.”

She laughs at that, her cheek warm against his arm. She presses her lips to his again. He hums in the back of his throat. Kisses her back until she can't imagine anything but this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really enjoyed writing this chapter and sort of resolving some things for Veronica. She deserves a break I think. Haha. I hope you liked it too!! Leave me a review if you did, I love reading them and hearing what you all enjoy! I planned out a couple chapters and I think this fic is almost ready to start wrapping up. Bittersweet for me because I've loved writing it so much! See you all in the next chapter, or you can find me anytime on tumblr as vaarchie!


	13. Chapter 13

The police bring Veronica's parents in for statements and questioning the next day. She wonders if the investors are still watching, if they saw her parents walk into the station, if they've been tipped off about what Veronica did; but somehow she doubts they'll believe her family would risk their own freedom by turning them in, so there is the element of surprise to consider. Archie is still in the hospital, so they send an officer out to get his version of the story from his bedside.

 

Veronica goes in and out of his room all day long, shaking her head and sitting down hard in the arm chairs, a consistent feeling like a physical collapse.

 

She keeps up her end of the conversation with Archie like a star, frankly, so chatty she's borderline manic, but underneath she's feeling edgy and out of sorts, restless and almost panicky, like she's pressing at the inside of her skin trying to get out. It’s just garden-variety anxiety, probably, but she hardly hears a word he says all day.

  
The truth: she can’t stop thinking about the investors.

  
“Okay,” Archie protests finally, pulling back a bit. Veronica is on the edge of his hospital bed, one of his hands cupped at the base of her neck. She feels tense from the tips of her ears all the way down to her ankles. “You’re being weird.”

 

“Who, me?” she asks, bluffing, eyes wide and innocent. “I’m fine.”

  
He doesn’t believe her -- she can tell that he doesn’t believe her -- but he lets her kiss him for another minute before he tries again.

 

“Ronnie,” he says, rubbing his palm up and down her arm. “Come on. You can talk to me.”

 

She sighs. “What if they don't catch them?” she asks, and Archie shakes his head resolutely.

 

“They will,” he says, like there's nothing in the world he's more sure of, almost certain enough to make Veronica believe.

 

After that they nap for a while, Archie’s body warm and solid under the covers and both of them in and out of sleep. He traces the edges of her shoulders with one gentle thumb. She wants to wrap him up inside the sheets and keep him for days and days, for the two of them to just hang out forever; she's terrible at napping, normally, but with Archie everything feels easy and relaxed, even in a hospital.

 

...

 

Veronica spends the next two days and nights in the waiting room or in Archie's hospital room, waiting for something bad to happen, with Archie's condition or with the investors.

 

She and Jughead and Betty take shifts, going home for showers, making dinners out of Diet Coke and Fritos from the vending machines. Betty's mom leaves casseroles on Fred's doorstep. Hermione brings changes of clothes. Veronica comes down with a spring cold that keeps her up nights and turns her, for all intents and purposes, into an extra from a movie about the zombie apocalypse. Archie keeps telling them all to go home, but they don't: Jughead sleeps in his plastic chair, Betty reads magazines, Veronica prays. She's stopped eating almost entirely; she thinks of Jesus in the desert, fighting his demons for forty days.

 

When Tuesday morning comes though, a shift takes place.

 

She wakes up in Archie's hospital bed, her joints creaky and cramped, her arm indented with creases from the sheets, her skin warm from being pressed against his all night. She sits up and grabs her phone.

 

There's a news notification flashing bright at the top of the screen.

 

_Business capital Lodge Industries raided by police late last night…_

 

She feels all the air go out of her, like a valve’s been released somewhere. All at once she's so full of emotion she can't even place her finger on it.

 

She looks through her missed calls and finds one from the police station, followed by a voicemail.

 

_We can't risk your father's colleagues catching wind of our investigation… we're arresting them tonight…_

 

She opens up the news article.

 

The building was on lockdown until early this morning. Multiple arrests. One fatality.

 

She calls the station.

 

Irena opened fire on the officers, they report over the phone. They had to take her down, and in the process she was killed. Everyone else Veronica turned in files on is in custody, and the building is being searched high and low.

 

It's over, they tell her.

 

…

 

Veronica's parents come to pick her up for dinner that night, driving to the only white tablecloth restaurant in Riverdale.

 

She walks inside with no real plan other than to sit there and eat and listen to the rain, to let it wash her clean if there’s any conceivable way. She's felt like sleeping since the moment she opened her eyes. She settles herself into her seat, blows on the coffee she orders until it’s cool enough to drink without scalding the inside of her body.

 

“Veronica,” her father says carefully. “We want to tell you something.”

 

She looks up from her coffee and at her parents, past the bread basket on the table and the vase of gladiolas. Her mother's favorites. The flowers are a bright, screaming pink.

 

“Okay,” Veronica says slowly. “What is it?” She says a quick and silent prayer for this to not be more bad news, not when she finally felt something close to relief.

 

“We're officially turning Lodge Industries clean,” her dad announces, his spine straightening. “I know we've said that to you before and we didn't follow through with it, but this time we are. After everything…” he clears his throat, straightens his tie. “We just… want to do better for you.”

 

Oh.

 

“You do?” she asks, haltingly.

 

“We do,” her father affirms. “And another thing. We're going to officially make you a co-owner of the business, so anything we do will need your approval along with ours. We know you'll never let things go off track again.” He clears his throat. “Lodge Industries is your empire to inherit or do what you want with one day, and it's only fair that we make sure it's good and right for you.”

 

She feels shocked right down to her bones, like someone could have told her this conversation would be happening a week ago and she wouldn't have believed them.

 

“How do you feel, mija?” her mother asks. Her eyes are full of genuine concern, and Veronica looks at her then.

 

When Veronica was ten and eleven she and her mother used to go out to expensive lunches and get pedicures every weekend, reading gossip magazines and picking out their favorite dresses on each page. She was a successful business owner with her husband and went to flea markets looking for cool antique rugs for their hallways; she bought Veronica an incredible rose-quartz necklace when she turned thirteen.

 

Veronica's been thinking about her mom lately, about her dad too, and the secrets they keep from her. The ones she keeps from them. They used to feel like such a solid unit of measure, the ideal family. They used to make her feel so safe. Veronica almost tells her mom something else then. She _wants_ to tell her something else -- that the past month she felt so scared without her, that she misses her, that she’s talented and even if Veronica doesn’t forgive her she's still proud that she’s her mom.

 

Thoughts tumble around in her brain, wild and overheated like clothes in a dryer. “I'm okay,” she says finally, smiling just a little. She has a sharp, ridiculous urge to laugh. “I really am, finally.”

 

…

 

A week later and Archie is released from the hospital looking paler and considerably worn out.

 

Veronica is laying in his bed with him while they eat pizza and watch some horror movie she agreed to against her better judgement, door wide open per Mary's instructions.

 

“Relax,” Archie tells her halfway through, laughing as she almost jumps off the bed for the third time in twenty minutes. She hates scary movies, is the truth.

  
“You relax. That bitch is _dead_ ,” she replies, reaching for the popcorn on the bedside table and nodding at the girl detective on-screen. Vegas is snoozing on the floor.

  
“Nah.” Archie pulls her closer, one hand playing idly in her hair. He smells like air and soap, clean. “She’s too cute. The cute ones never die.”

  
“In what universe?” she asks, laughing. She leans into his shoulder and when she turns her head to look at him they're face to face like commuters on a packed train at rush hour, and she really just needs half an inch to kiss him.

 

“Ronnie--” he begins, but she cuts him off.

  
“Shh,” she says, focusing. She wants this moment to last as long as possible. She wants to remember every detail and write it all down later so she won't lose it, not ever. “Just... shh.” And she's going to say _just stay right here_ but instead there is the sudden press of lips and faces, tongues in each other’s mouths like every stunted _love you_ is hidden there.

 

She gets her arms around his neck, hard and clutching. She almost wants to laugh again, feels drunk, almost. She's just glad to be here right now. After a moment, she hears him say her name.

 

She bites at Archie’s bottom lip, aware of but trying to ignore the open door; she runs her hands up over his hair. She's always been fascinated by the way Archie is put together, the dips between his fingers and the muscles in his back.

 

“There you are,” he says after a minute, two palms on either side of her face like he wants to make sure she's not planning to go anywhere. He’s smiling hard and bright against her mouth.

  
“Hi.” Kissing him feels familiar but always new, a song they haven’t played on the radio in a really long time. “Should probably pause the movie.”

  
“Who cares?” He’s got his teeth at the place where her neck meets her shoulder and is lifting the hem of her shirt the tiniest bit, cool fingertips against her hips. “You don't even like scary movies. God, Ronnie,” he murmurs, nosing close to her ear. “I love you so freaking much.”

  
“Shh,” she hushes him again, concentrating. He tastes like salt and summer. “I love you, too.”

 

...

 

Veronica stays at his house late that night. The two of them sit on the floor of his bedroom until almost eleven, playing an epic game of rummy: he's one of the only ones who's ever managed to learn Veronica's convoluted set of house rules.

 

She runs downstairs to get them more ice cream out of the freezer, tossing a giddy, “Don't cheat!” over her shoulder, and comes back five minutes later with a pint of Super Fudge Chunk in her hand to find him not where she left him but standing instead by his window, looking out.

 

“You okay?” Veronica asks. She helps him sit down on his own bed, in his own bedroom, for one of the first times in what feels like forever. She sets the ice cream down on the side table. He nods, pulling her down to sit beside him.

 

“Are you?”

 

She nods too, sinking back into the pillows. She's slept over here so much the sheets even smell like her. Archie lays next to her, easy.

 

“Any news from the station?” He asks.

 

She traces patterns over his shoulder, brushes her fingers just gently over the gauze wrapping over his chest, over the literal hole in his body. “The trials start tomorrow. Time in prison is guaranteed for all of them; it's just a matter of sentencing, I guess.” She rolls over onto her back, staring up at the ceiling, breathing.

 

“It's really over,” Archie says quietly.

 

There's something in the way he says it that makes Veronica think he's just wrapping his brain around it for the first time, the fact that they really don't have to live in constant fear and danger anymore.

 

“It's really over,” she repeats.

 

He looks over at her, smiles. “How are we going to keep ourselves entertained when we're not cheating death every day anymore?”

 

She smiles, too. She hasn't really thought about the return to normal life they'll be shortly taking, and she wasn't expecting him to bring it up tonight. It's officially spring break and the two of them along with Betty and Jughead are using that as a shining opportunity to catch up on all their missed school work, but lately summer feels like it will be here any minute now.

 

That thought lands for her, sharp and sudden. She looks at the lush green trees outside in the dark. Soon she'll have a blank slate. Everyone, not just her, will be fresh and clean and new.

 

“Whatever you kids do in Riverdale for fun, clearly,” she says. “You'll have to show me.”

 

He pokes his tongue into his cheek. Leans over and kisses her again, long and soft.

 

“I still want to take that trip to Seattle with you,” he murmurs against her ear.

 

She smiles and sits, reaching down to grab their spoons out of the bowl on the carpet.

 

“Oh!” Archie says suddenly, pushing himself up. He reaches over the side of his bed where there's a plastic grocery bag, and emerges with a fat pomegranate in each hand. “I asked my mom to pick these up for us,” he says easily, grinning at her like his is a world where good things happen often, and like she's one of them.

  
In spite of the terror surrounding the memory of his first pomegranate back in New York, Veronica feels herself smile at the sight of him, sleepy and happy.

  
“Ooh,” she says. “I’m excited.”

  
He hands her one of the pomegranates, sits down cross-legged on the bed.

“What'd you think, I'd only have artificial sugar to offer you?” He gestures at the pint of ice cream. He kisses the side of her forehead, then cracks open his pomegranate, swearing softly as the juice drips onto his sheets. He digs at the seeds for a minute and then holds up a hunk of the rind. He looks curious. “What happens if I eat the hard part?” he wants to know.

  
She looks at him, still smiling, the warm flush of his earlier words about Seattle. “A pomegranate grows in your stomach,” she tells him.

  
“Really?”

  
“If you’re lucky.”

  
Archie grins and sinks down on the mattress beside her. “Oh, I’m real lucky,” he says.

...

 

On her way home that night, Veronica stops by the store and picks up a map and a road atlas of the continental United States.

 

Just to see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! So, the next chapter will be the final installment of this fic. I have so many feelings about this and I won't spill my heart out just yet! But more than anything I'm extremely grateful for all of you who have supported this fic, left reviews, asked questions on tumblr, etc. Interacting with you is the highlight of everything and I couldn't love you more. Now, onward -- the last chapter of Devotion will be up in just a few days, and I hope you love it. xo


	14. Chapter 14

**_8 weeks later_ **

Archie wakes up sometime after dawn, stirred by the clanging of the garbage truck as it makes its way down his street. He listens for a moment to the crash of the metal cans next door, and when he opens his eyes, he’s surprised to find Veronica still sleeping next to him: For all the nights they’ve spent together, this might well be one of the first times she hasn’t woken up before him.

  
He takes the chance to look at her, face down with one arm slung over her head, black hair a waterfall over her shoulders. Just for a minute he gives in to the urge to touch her, brush her hair away from her face, but Ronnie doesn’t stir. She sleeps differently than she used to. She thrashes less, breathes more deeply. It used to be that she shuddered in her sleep, trembled and jumped like the devil was in her dreams.  It’s not until Archie gets out of bed that she wakes up, opening her eyes halfway.

  
“Where are you going?” she wants to know, stretching a little.

  
He smiles. “Gotta get up.”

  
She shakes her head sleepily and holds the blanket open, an invitation for him to climb back in. “Five more minutes.”

  
He runs his thumb over her cheek gently. “Okay.” he slides beneath the quilt, rolling onto his back and looking over at her. 

 

“Hi,” she says.

  
“Hi. What do you have today?”  he asks, lacing one arm around her shoulder, pulling her down until her head is resting on his chest.

 

“Nothing,” she breathes out, and he can hear the smile in her voice.

 

School is officially out for the summer, and the two of them have absolutely no plans other than to be sixteen years old and in love with each other.

 

“Maybe we can spend the day together, then,” he says, and she leans up to kiss him to say yes.

 

…

 

In the afternoon they wander through the cluttered record store on Main Street, all low ceilings and narrow aisles and the smell of old paper and must, rare old discs locked safely into glass-front cabinets and fusty shopkeepers keeping a watchful eye on the store. It’s the kind of place Veronica probably would have found boring a year ago, but Archie is so clearly in heaven that she finds herself getting excited about it too, the two of them digging through the messy, overcrowded stacks with the enthusiasm of kids on Christmas morning.

 

“You know you’re not going to have room for all these in your collection,” she says good-naturedly as Archie adds yet another disc to the pile he’s intending to purchase.

 

“I’ll make room,” he says determinedly.

 

“You will, huh?” she asks, charmed. He raises his eyebrows in reply, then sets the records on a nearby shelf and kisses her, broad chest and both hands on her face.

  
  
“This,” he mutters against her mouth, “is how I want to die.”   


  
She laughs, flattening her palms against his T-shirt; she can feel his heart tapping steadily away underneath the cotton. Record stores are holy sites for Archie. Back when they first started dating he used to bring her CDs instead of flowers, leaving them on her desk and in stacks at her door like offerings -- Led Zeppelin and the Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac. She’s never been huge into that genre of music, truthfully, but she didn’t want him to think she was a moron, and in the end she was surprised by how much she enjoyed them, dipping into a dozen different worlds in the sterile quiet of her room, earphones blaring. She wanted to know all the artists he’d fallen in love with. She wanted to hear everything he’d heard.

  
  
“Come on,” she says now, pulling gently away. “If we get kicked out of this place for unmusical activities, you’re never going to forgive me.”

  
  
“You’re probably right,” Archie says seriously -- then kisses her back into the shadows, grabbing one last disc off the shelf above her head.

 

…

 

“So,” Hiram says the next day, stepping into Veronica's room and idling a little by the door. “Remember how you told me about that trip you wanted to take?”

 

Veronica raises her eyebrows at him, wonders where this conversation could be going. A tiny part deep inside of her starts to get excited. “Yeah,” she says slowly, “I do.”

 

Her relationship with her parents is better now. It's not perfect, and she's not too sure it ever will be, or even if she  _ wants _ it to be -- but it's better. It was easier to start forgiving them once all the investors were officially locked away in prison and Veronica didn’t have to fear for her life at every turn.

 

“Well,” her father says, and then holds up a key. “I was thinking I wanted to let you have my old car so you can take that trip.”

 

Veronica's face breaks into a wide grin. “Seriously?” she says, and she's laughing, joy spilling out. She jumps up to hug her dad.

 

…

 

And so it happens. They get the car tuned up; her parents buy her new tires. She runs errands for some last-minute supplies -- sunscreen and notebooks, novels on tape. She's scheduled to hit the road in the morning. She still hasn't told Archie -- he's been talking a lot these last few weeks about being  _ spontaneous _ , and she's thinking he's going to love her sudden offer to join her on a cross country road trip.

 

It feels like pretend, but she's dead serious this time: after all, she can't see the world if she never leaves her town. She's done sitting here waiting for her real life to find her. She has a giant atlas, a list of places she wants to see, and no real plan except to get in the car and go. She is terrified and thrilled.

 

It’s just first light when she reaches Archie's house, dawn coming up bright and vivid behind her. She stopped at the gas station on the way over to fuel up and grab last-minute provisions; she rubs sleepily at her eyes, put out by the early hour.

 

  
The radio bumbles, a low, soothing sound. She digs a couple of pebbles out of the planters in the Andrews’ front yard, then cuts across the cluster of bushes on the lawn and tosses them, one by one, at his window. Barely seven in the morning but it’s already hot, the slick of damp air across her skin.

 

  
Nothing happens. She holds her breath: This is a stupid gesture, way lamer than it is poetic, but it made a weird kind of sense on the way over here. She's just about to give up when Archie raises the screen and looks. “That for me?” he  asks. Even from a full flight down, he’s got a hell of a smile. 

 

She smiles back, big and reflexive, and holds up the round pomegranate she has in her hand in a red, sour-sweet salute. “Looks that way.”

  
Archie nods a little, sleepy and impressed. “It’s early,” is all he says.

  
“I know. I didn’t want to waste any time.” She hesitates, and then she says it: “I just stopped by to find out if you felt like taking a trip.”

  
Even from all the way down here she can see his dark eyebrows arc. “Where are you going?” he asks, leaning a little further out the window, like he’s trying to get a good look at her face.

  
She shrugs, raises her hands a little helplessly. “Not sure,” she admits, still grinning. It feels hugely powerful to say. “But I brought a lot of notebooks.”

  
“Oh, yeah?” he asks, faux-casual. “Gonna do some writing?”

  
“Thinking about it,” she tells him, equally easy. It feels like they’re circling something here, like maybe they both know where this is going to end. Like maybe they sort of always have. “Gonna start in Seattle.”

  
Archie nods his approval. “Seattle is nice,” he says mildly. His fingers curve around the window frame. “When are you leaving?”

  
“Right now.”

  
Archie doesn’t say anything for a moment, then: “Wow.” He’s looking at her like she's essential to life. He's looking at her like she's something rare.

 

He straightens up in the window, tall and familiar; the pomegranate weighs in her hand. “I mean. Can you wait five minutes for me to put clothes on?”

  
Veronica laughs out loud and sudden, like there’s something fizzing and happy inside her veins. She didn’t realize until right this second that she was holding her breath, but letting it out is relieving, tension draining away. “I think so,” she says, still giggling --  _ giggling _ , seriously, like she hasn’t done in forever. “That sounds fine.”

  
“Good,” Archie says, and starts to tug the window down. “Stay put. I’ll be right there.”

  
“Okay,” she tells him, then: “Archie?”

  
He stops, peers back out at her. “Yeah?”

  
She stands there, staring up at him. “I love you, you know that?”

  
“I—” Archie breaks off, grinning hard and bright and happy. “I do know that, actually,” he says after a moment. “But it's always nice to hear.” He laughs a bit. “I love you too.”

  
It’s nice to say, she wants to tell him, then realizes she's got a whole country to say it. She's got a whole continent. She's got the whole world. The sun is rising, orange, a glowing circle in the sky.

  
“Come on,” she calls, tilting her chin up. “I’m driving this time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end!! It's hard for me to believe Devotion is officially over, but I feel really happy with the story itself, and with the way it ended. Relentless angst with a soft, happy finish; my favorite kind of fic. This last chapter is definitely the shortest, but I feel like it was just the right length and everything wrapped up nicely. Thank you so much to everyone who left kudos or reviews here, or comments in my Tumblr ask box (one more plug: you can find me there as vaarchie to keep up with any and all future fics). It's been an absolute pleasure writing this fic for you all, and I hope you're happy with how it ended. Signing off on Devotion for now. xo <3


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